Do you have one of those fishing buddies you swear is more lucky than good? You know, the guy who always seems to stumble into a limit but never really has an explanation of how he did it.
I know a few people like that – a few pros too. Some of it is a result of simple luck. After all, any sport so heavily influenced by Mother Nature puts competitors at the mercy of luck to a certain degree. But mostly, I think some anglers are just better at “being around fish” than the rest of us.
I’ve noticed that the best pros in the business can go out on the water and almost navigate to the general vicinity of quality bass simply by feel. They don’t even need to understand why they’re fishing where they are. It just feels right, so they do it. And when you’re around fish, the odds of lucking into a big stringer are higher.
I call this an accidental pattern. It’s the kind of pattern you don’t really game plan for, but that just sort of reveals itself through happenstance – a fish that flashes away from the trolling motor as you pull up to a laydown to free a snagged lure, or one that swipes at a fouled crankbait as it swirls across the surface, or a keeper that eats your partner’s Texas rig under the boat as he picks out a backlash. These little clues can lead to patterns.
I experienced a great example of this last summer in my favorite little test pond. No, I’m not a pro at being around fish, but that’s why I love testing new lures in ponds. Just standing next to the pond, I know I’m already around the fish because if they aren’t on the bank, they’re in the deeper center portion.
Last summer, I had been wearing down these pond bass pretty hard on some new custom topwater baits that are absolutely killer (more on those soon). Eventually, they just stopped eating them. I actually felt like I had pressured them too much to hit surface lures, and coupled with high temperatures and little rain to freshen the pond, the fishing got really slow on subsequent trips.
Once I finished giving the topwaters a workout, I wanted to go back to catching fish just for fun, so I tied on a pond-fishing sure thing: a wacky-rigged soft-plastic stick bait. Surprisingly, it wasn’t producing – but it did reveal to me an accidental pattern.
I was skipping the wacky rig along the bank and slowly working it with a combination dead-fall, flick-shaking action. When I reeled up for another cast, the stick bait skittered just under the surface, pushing a little wake as it did, and a bass rushed up to eat it.
This happened again a short while later. They wouldn’t eat it just slowly falling, or even twitching through the water column. But when it skittered along in the surface film – on a day when topwater hadn’t produced – they were willing to chase it. This was my first clue.
I had to think of a lure that could be fished “within the film” all the way along the bank so I could put it in front of as many fish as possible. The solution was a soft-plastic swimbait waked under the surface. I tied on a Gambler Big EZ and crept it along just fast enough to stay within the surface film – it was game on after that.
Soon, I wondered if I could get away with a faster, more efficient presentation, something I didn’t have to re-rig after each fish and that started working as soon as I turned the reel, instead of sinking as soon as it landed, as the Big EZ did. I tied on a Lucky Craft LC 2.5WK wake bait. That was the ticket. They ate it up when waked just under the surface, or even pushing a big “V” across the surface. Yet they still wouldn’t eat that spitting, popping topwater lure.
While my pond bass tactics didn’t win me any tournament, the process I followed to come up with the most efficient, effective pattern, is exactly what tournament pros go through on the lake every week. Sometimes they show up with a game plan in mind that suggests a particular lure. Other times, dragging a wacky rig back through the water gives them that one bite – that one clue – they need to find the trigger that day.
And in the end, it doesn’t matter if you found the pattern through intense research and on-the-water experimenting, or because your fishing buddy Bubba shook a few bass out of some shorline cover with his crankbait. What matters is catching fish.