When he’s not competing in MLF Select events or fishing the FLW Tour, Kurt Dove works as a fishing guide on Lake Amistad in East Texas. Translation: he tells (and shows) people how to catch bass.

We asked Dove to put on his fishing-guide hat so he could offer some tips on how to deal with the water conditions that he and the rest of the Summit Select anglers faced with with this week in Hot Springs, Arkansas:

MLF: Water levels have been fluctuating in this part of Arkansas for a couple of weeks now. What’s hardest to deal with, rising water or falling water?

KD: “Boy, they can both be tough to deal with. One of the most difficult things about rising or falling water is that it scatters the fish. For lack of a better way to describe it, fish are constantly ‘losing their houses’ because changing water affects their cover. In general, though, I’d say that rapidly falling water is the hardest, because fish tend to move out away from the bank and suspend. It can be really difficult to get them to bite, and they become hard to target because they’re not relating to cover.”

MLF: What’s the biggest adjustment you’ll make in these kinds of conditions?

KD: “It’s as much a mentality adjustment as a physical adjustment. You have to go into the day knowing that fish won’t likely be in a concentrated area. You have to go through your fish-finding process with the mentality that you’re not going to find a place with wads of fish. Oh, you might find a concentration of them in the back of a creek or a cove and capitalize on that, but it’s not like you’re going to find several areas like that.”