Wall’s lessons for intuitive angling in the FFS age
More than anything else, success in bass fishing boils down to decision-making — that’s no secret. On any given competition day, an angler must decide where to start, what techniques to use, whether to stay put or move elsewhere, what the winning pattern is going to be and whether he or she can get on it.
While practice, pre-practice and research can all be helpful in getting a head start on making the right decisions, the best anglers are able to adapt on the water, using what they observe combined with their knowledge to figure out where to go and what to try next. A common term for that ability to make the right calls on the water is intuitive angling.
Mercury pro Jacob Wall, who finished 28th in the Fishing Clash Angler of the Year standings during his second Bass Pro Tour season (thus qualifying for REDCREST 2025 on his home lake of Lake Guntersville), believes intuition is the most important trait a successful angler can possess. He also believes that, while decision-making has remained critical in recent years, it’ll be even more important moving forward. Both the BPT’s new forward-facing sonar rules, which only allow anglers to utilize the technology for one of three periods each day, as well as the revamped General Tire Team Series, which drops anglers onto bodies of water with no prior practice or information, will shine an even brighter spotlight on intuition.
So, how does one improve intuition? Wall offered four lessons for aspiring anglers.
1. Don’t get stuck staring at your screen
Forward-facing sonar has proven to be an invaluable information-gathering tool. Having eyes underwater has offered anglers groundbreaking insights into where bass live, how they feed, etc. All that information is key to understanding bass, which in turn helps develop intuition on the water.
That said, Wall offered a word of caution for aspiring anglers: Don’t just stare at a screen.
“Let’s just say you pull into an area, and you sit down and there’s a bunch of fish suspended swimming around, and you realize, hey, this spot’s got fish all over the place,” Wall said. “You may be able to sit there all day and just pan around and float around with the trolling motor, and you’re kind of just mindlessly throwing at dots. I’ve seen it happen to myself — I almost just kind of go numb. I almost stop really thinking.
“And it’s like, what am I doing? My whole life, my whole career, the No. 1 thing that I’ve enjoyed is the puzzle, putting it together. And now I’m out here just numbly throwing at dots.”
As powerful as forward-facing sonar can be, Wall believes it’s important to develop other means for figuring out where bass are located and what they might bite — paying attention to weather changes, current or how fish are eating a bait, for instance. When anglers do utilize forward-facing sonar, he urged them to stay engaged, constantly thinking about why those bass are where they are and whether there might be a better way to catch them or generate bigger bites.
That goes for non-forward-facing anglers too, by the way. It can be just as easy to go through the motions as you troll down a bank.
“You always want to feel like your next cast is that cast,” he said. “You constantly want to be looking ahead and thinking, ‘Well, if the throw I just made there wasn’t a bite, where is a bite?’ So, you’re constantly trying to figure out where that next bite is, and if it starts to become or feel like you’re going through the motions, I’d say the No. 1 thing I do in my fishing is I try to change what I’m doing.”
2. Learn to read the water
Wall currently resides in Alabama, but he grew up in the Pacific Northwest targeting salmon, steelhead and trout from rivers. Those roots taught him a skill that he still uses today — how to read water.
“If I look at a rock in a river, like a small river, I look at that thing and I look at the way it breaks the water — that’s reading it,” Wall said. “You look at it, and you go, ‘well, it’s breaking it in front of it, breaking it behind it. It’s got a current seam right there in front of that rock and right there behind it, that seam swings down there.’”
That might not seem overly relevant to tournament bass fishing, save for the few events in which heavy current comes into play. However, even when he’s not fishing moving water, Wall said he’s always reading the fishery. Whether that’s taking in an entire body of water and thinking through how it lays out and where bass might be congregating or using his eyes to break down individual pieces of cover, Wall stressed the importance of analyzing where to make each presentation.
“Whether it’s sub-surface contour lines and making decisions off that or visually making decisions off of a laydown tree or a dock or water willow growing off the bank, all these things, I’m constantly reading the water.”
3. Listen to your gut … to an extent
Many anglers equate intuition to trusting their gut. Wall said that’s partly true. He emphasized the importance of changing it up when something “doesn’t feel right.”
“Even if the pattern you’re doing (is right) and for some reason your head is not there, forget about it,” he said. “Go do something else that feels right. Go flip a jig if that’s your confidence. Go throw something that’s more along the lines of what is going to build your confidence.”
That said, Wall noted that there were times early in his career when he tried too hard to listen to his gut. Every time a new idea popped into his brain, he’d try it, which resulted in him fishing too fast and never developing a pattern.
Toeing the line between staying the course or trying something different is one of the core dilemmas of bass fishing. Wall’s solution: When something occurs to him, he takes a few minutes to mull the idea before committing.
“I’ve kind of found that, for me, what works best is I have a thought, I kind of make a couple more casts, and if that thought really feels like it’s putting a lot of pressure on me, then I will lean towards making that adjustment,” he said.
4. Time on the water beats all
All this talk of intuition might sound great, but getting to the point that your gut consistently leads you to the right answer isn’t so straightforward. Wall believes there’s only one way to get there — time on the water.
When speaking to young anglers, his No. 1 piece of advice is to spend as much time fishing as possible and to be mindful while doing so. That doesn’t have to be full days from the front deck of a bass boat, either.
“Experience really could be anything,” Wall said. “It could be walking down on the shoreline of a small lake and seeing something, and you’re kind of like, ‘Oh, interesting, I’ve never really quite seen that before.’ And then you might go out on the boat the next time and you see something very similar, and you’re like, ‘Holy cow, dude, I saw that on the bank and the fish were doing this.’ So, a piece of the puzzle could be found anywhere.”
Some of that time on the water can (and in this day and age should) include forward-facing sonar. But Wall urged anglers not to simply pan around until they see fish. Hone your intuition to understand the reason why those dots are where they are and the best ways to catch them. Ultimately, he believes those anglers who can combine mastery of new-age technology with good, old-fashioned intuition are poised to be most successful.