 The
other day while I was putting away tackle, I came across
boxes full of lures and baits. They had been used once
or twice and retired to "this lure has no purpose"
status. I began to wonder how did I come to own these
"losers" of the fishing lure world. It didn't
take long to realize, I had purchased these items because
I had not thought through the reasons for making these
purchases.
If you're like me and most other fishermen I know,
when you walk into your favorite tackle department and
peruse the selection of offerings you are thinking;
"Wasn't it the pink buzzbait that my buddy Tom
caught that nice bunch of fish with?" "Kevin
Van Dam just won a tournament on that newly marketed
crankbait?" That's the ticket, it is sure to win
me the club tourney this Saturday. If this is your motivation
for most of your lure purchases, then before you walk
into the tackle shop again and spend some more of your
hard earned money, you may want to take some advise
from someone who has been there and done that.
By examining my reasons for all of these lure purchases,
I realized that as a serious fisherman it was more important
for me to look at my lures as tools and not toys. If
I was going to be a successful bass fisherman, I needed
to know not only the right tool use but how to use it
and under which conditions. The closest analogy I can
think of is mining. If a miner is hired to drill a tunnel
through bedrock it would be unproductive to use a bit
that is designed to drill through sand or topsoil. The
same reasoning applies to bass fishing, lures are designed
to be used in certain situations and conditions. To
throw a jerkbait with three sets of treble hooks on
to a mat of floating moss is the same as attempting
to drill through granite with a sand bit. We have to
use the proper tool for the conditions at hand.
What is the purpose of a lure? To catch fish of course,
but a lure cannot be looked at as something you cast
into a lake and fish come swimming from all points to
eat it. Bass fishing doesn't work that way. A lure is
a tool used to mine fish out of a specific environment.
You must analyze the weather conditions, the water conditions,
the time of day, the season, the type of body of water
i.e.: natural lake, reservoir, or river and form a conclusion.
You then make an educated guess as to where the fish
will be and only then do you begin to decide what lure
you will use. There isn't a single person on the face
of the planet Earth who can tell a bass where it has
to be when it is in its own environment. But there are
some talented individuals that can read these conditions
and predict with a high rate of accuracy where the fish
are.
These same individuals are smart enough to know; they
can't tell a bass when or what to eat. However, they
do know which lures in their tackle box will reach the
fish and know how to present them in a manner that will
entice a bass to strike. The speed and depth of the
lure are two very important factors causing bass to
strike. Finding out which speed and what depth to fish
are the first two things you have to establish in the
course of a days fishing. Once you establish that part
of the pattern, you can then fine tune it by adding
in other factors such as the type or make up of the
structure the fish are relating to on any given day
i.e.: weed or wood, points or inside corners. This brings
us back to the use of proper tools.
To make all this a little simpler, lets break things
down to basics. There are three basic speeds; slow,
medium, and fast, and three basic depths; shallow, medium
and deep. These are relative terms, for example if you
find fish at a depth of six feet in a lake that has
a maximum depth of seven feet, then that's deep. Let's
go back to the Van Dam example, if he caught fish using
a crankbait that runs ten feet down, what do we really
need to know? Since crankbaits are most effective when
they are making contact with something, we assume he
was finding the fish in seven to ten feet of water.
What is missing from the equation? The speed of retrieve.
Was he burning the lure, was he reeling it steady at
a medium pace or was he just crawling it across the
bottom? Once we determine the missing factors we have
the framework of the pattern.
Finding these factors does require that you use the
proper tools. If you think the fish are in a certain
depth zone, you can alter the speed of the presentation
by using different tools. If those fish wanted a even
slower presentation you could show them a jig'n pig.
Combing the water at a variety of different speeds until
the bass tell you what they want. Then try to fine tune
this by introducing finer details such as color, sound
and wobble or in the case of jigs, motion. Jig retrieves
vary in motion, vertical motion such as hopping or horizontal
as in a swimming presentation. This will help you zero
in on what the fish want and where they are residing
for the day. The recipe for a good day of fishing.
This may seem like a lot of thinking to do on a day
of recreating. But the more time you spend on the water
practicing these techniques it starts to become second
nature and you'll spend much less time organizing expensive
lures that don't seem to work. There is no substitute
for experience, the saying goes, and there is no forum
better than fishing to prove that axiom true. So the
next time you are in the tackle shop, stop for a minute
and think about what you are doing. What is that TOOL
going to be able to do for you? Pick your tools wisely
and then give lake a good drilling!
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