Duh Moments on the Water

I recently got the opportunity to fish a private body of water. A friend of mine, Mark Copley (“Skippy”) at Strike King Lure Company, set me up to fish at a private lake with of his regional pro staffers in Alabama. The weeks leading up to this fishing trip, Skippy had made it possible for me to take my father-in-law to a lake that has produced several 8- to 11-pound largemouth. Knowing that, I got all excited about this trip.

I had some new rods that I needed to test, and being from California, originally, I figured there wasn’t a better way to test a rod than to chuck some BIG swimbaits with it. We launched my boat, I picked up my father-in-law, Dennis, and we proceeded down the bank of the earthen dam.

I was tossing a big Rago Baits BV3D swimmer and a River2Sea Swaver 200, and my father-in-law was throwing a River2Sea Whopper Plopper 130 topwater bait. We waited for the first strike, and we waited, and we waited some more.

About 20 minutes or so into our fishing trip, we had yet to get a bite. So we thought about what the property owner told us, loving to throw Strike King’s Hack Attack Jigs on the lake. I looked through my tackle and found only football head jigs and swim jigs. Oh well, we tied a pair of the pigskin-shape jigs on and started throwing.

Fast forwarding to 45 minutes later, and perhaps 60 different trips up the bank to retrieve football jigs hung in the wood laying on the lakebed, and I’m at my wit’s end.

Thankfully, my father-in law had taken the stink off the boat when he picked up the Whopper Plopper (likely while I was retying after another hang-up) and caught a 2-pounder. But, I had fished nearly a quarter of the 30-acre lake’s shoreline catching nothing but stick bass.

I sat there wracking my brain thinking of what to throw that would, A) not get hung up, and B) appeal to the big bass without attracting all the little ones. A couple hang-ups later and I remembered something; make a light Punch Rig.

I remembered being in the boat with Weatherford, Texas, pro Gary Klein three weeks earlier on Toledo Bend Reservoir and listening him talk about flipping flooded bushes with a jig. He said while he preferred to fish the jig, a FishBoss.com Punch Ring under a pegged ½-ounce tungsten weight with a straight shank flippin’ or EWG Hook and a creature bait would allow the bait to come through the cover a bit better.

So, I stopped what I was doing, tied on a ½-ounce River2Sea tungsten weight, a Paycheck Baits Punch Skirt with a TroKar Magnum Worm Hook and a Strike King Menace grub. Ten casts later without a snag, I get a bite on what the landowner said was one of his favorite banks on the lake.

I feel a “thunk,” and the line starts swimming off. I set the hook and my rod doubles over. After several minutes of chasing the fish around the bow of the boat, under the trolling motor and back towards the Power Poles and big motor, I pulled her back to the port side and lipped a 6-pound, 2-ounce largemouth. Not bad at all.

We fished for a while catching some more small ones on the light Punch Rigs and Davis Bait Company Shaky Heads before it was time to head for home. We had fun; I caught a good one and most importantly, spent a fun day with my father-in-law while they were visiting from California.

What never ceases to amaze me though is how long it takes me to remember some of the tips I’ve learned from the pro anglers that I work with doing articles and videos. I suppose I could chalk it up to having so much in my head from all of the work I do; things just get pushed together and I can’t think clearly or quickly enough. Or, I think it also could be that I haven’t gotten enough time on the water to have it become second nature, like things used to be when I was a baseball player practicing four to five hours a day in college.

I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. I did finally think about it after all, and I did catch a good one. But, in thinking about the day a little later, I didn’t make the right adjustments, and I fished too slowly as a whole. I needed to put it in a little higher gear and give myself a chance to put the lure in front of more fish. But, if I hadn’t got hung up so much, maybe I would have been moving faster and made a decision sooner.

When you get down to where the rubber meets the road, there simply isn’t a substitute for time spent on the water.

“HONEY! I need to get out on the water more often.”