Good fishermen are an imaginative lot who often find unique ways to put pounds on the scale. They know a lot about fish, and the better ones think a lot about how both aquatic fritzbox kaufen and atmospheric environmental influences affect the bite.

But fishing pressure has become so intense and constant today that the anglers themselves have become one of the most important “environmental influences” upon the resource. Outsmarting fish isn’t just about secret baits anymore. It isn’t so much about secret spots, either. All anglers out there today know how to use depth finders and GPS technology. With each passing year, competitive angling becomes more about outsmarting other anglers, often in paradoxical ways.

One of the first I’ve ever seen do this was David Fritz.

I ran into him on Kentucky Lake many years ago. This was before Fritz became famous, and when we still had a lot of milfoil. I was between guide trips, so I was just puttering around, trying some different spots and keeping in touch with the bite.

Kentucky Lake

I only saw two other fishermen that morning. One of them threw a big rooster tail as he flew by to beat nobody to his favorite spot, and the other one was sitting, much to my mortification, right in the main spot I wanted to check. It was a main lake bank just south of Kenlake on the LBL side of Kentucky Lake.

This spot had been very good to me recently, and I wanted to make sure the bass were still there for the clients scheduled the following day. So I stopped a couple of hundred yards away and fished a little point, waiting for this man to “get out of my spot.”
After a while, it was obvious he wasn’t going anywhere, because he was catching a fish on almost every cast. Normally I give other fishermen plenty of room, but this guy was doing something unorthodox. He was fishing a big, old Poe’s in very shallow, thick milfoil.

Trolled Out To Deeper Water

At the time, I didn’t know who he was, but he was killing me with curiosity, so I put my rod down and trolled out to deeper water, so as not to interfere with his, and moved closer to have a look.
I thought he looked familiar, but I still didn’t know who he was, and he certainly didn’t know me from any other “Joe Lunch Box” out there. The tops of the grass where he made his long casts wasn’t more than a few feet under the surface. He retrieved the bait slower than some people fish a plastic worm, pausing each time the deep-diving bait bumped the greenery. After he released a nice bass, I asked him about his method.

Most fishermen describe crankbaits as shallow-, medium-, or deep-running. These descriptive divisions are based loosely on the size of the lip, and, to some extent, on the weight and bulk of the bait. These terms communicate roughly how deep the bait will dive on a normal retrieve and also imply when and where these baits should be used.

Popularized Deep-Running Crankbaits

Fritz almost single-handedly popularized deep-running crankbaits some years ago by winning a bunch of big tournaments. But he didn’t do it by running-and-gunning and chucking-and-retrieving as I later saw everybody doing with Poe’s and the many clones that followed. Most of the time, he fished deep-diving crankbaits very shallow, with considerable patience and finesse.
During our first meeting, this affable angler took the time to explain in great detail what he was doing and told me he often did the same thing in flooded timber.

The key, he explained, was to know the difference between the tick of a branch and the tick of a fish. “As long as you don’t set the hook into the cover,” he said, “the bait will float above it when you stop and you don’t get hung up much.”
David impressed me as a very candid and quiet man who really had no secrets. Maybe he realized hardly anyone would actually have the patience or finesse to fish big crankbaits that way, anyway, but I did-sometimes-and I discovered just a couple of years ago that it even works at night.

Another very good fisherman I know says his favorite fall technique is to drag square-lipped crank baits right through heavy brush. I’ve learned that a Texas-rigged plastic worm, fished with no weight whatsoever, beats anything I ever saw when bass move up into the flooded flowers and brush during the spring.

Slider, with their five-inch

A little later, a Pro Series Slider, with their five-inch welche fritzbox kaufen “bass worms” can be fished in places where other worm and jig fishermen won’t throw even fairly light rigs, because all they do is get hung up. It’s a way to fish a worm where other worms won’t go.
Through most of the summer and winter, I’ve found that the slow fall and “unusual” presentation of one-eighth-ounce or one-quarter-ounce jigs will beat the daylights out of the much heavier versions everyone else is lobbing about, and that spinning tackle and lighter lines will catch more bass than macho baitcasting stuff, because everyone is throwing heavy baits on macho baitcasting stuff.

It once was true that secret spots and secret baits gave bass fishermen an edge on the competition, but with the tremendous increase in competition, it is the unusual, paradoxical and secret presentations that give some fishermen the edge over the “environmental influence” of the fishing masses who run like heck and cast like crazy, using the same mass-produced things as everyone else, in the same places, with the same presentations, while expecting something different to happen.
If you want to stand out in the crowd, you’ve got to do something different.

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