When the Going Gets Tough

Consider the following two bassin' scenarios:

Scenario 1: It's Saturday morning, 5:30 A.M.. A typical weekend angler, all fired-up after a long week at work, heads out for what promises to be a fine morning & afternoon of casting for & catching bass on his favorite lake. So what if the lawn is shin-high? That's why there's two days in a weekend! The sun's coming up, there's not a trace of wind or a cloud in the sky, and last time he fished this lake (only a week ago) he slayed them.

"Life's good", he thinks as he hits the water.

12:30 P.M., some seven hours later. The same angler sighs in disgust as he pulls the cord on his lawnmower for the fifth time. His arm is already aching from the 2,000 casts he made earlier that day, and his outlook had dimmed because each & every one of those casts failed to draw even a single strike. "What a waste of half a day, I could have got this yardwork done
this morning."

This was to have been HIS day of glory, only Mr. Bass had other plans. Not a ripple graced the glassy water in the 6+ hours he spent on his hotspots, and not a bump was felt on the business-end of his fancy equipment. He fished shallow. He fished deep. He tried topwater in the early morning. He pitched jigs & worms under docks & around all kinds of cover. He threw spinnerbaits into the pads. He tried everything, even dragging a Carolina-rigged lizard on & over the best ledges in the lake. And he NEVER does that!

"Life's rough."

Scenario 2: Same Saturday, at a neighboring impoundment only miles from where the aforementioned angler ended his day prematurely in frustration. It's the waning minutes of the final day of a national bass tournament. A well-known pro expertly pitches a jig-n-pig combo to the farthest reaches of a boat dock's walkway. He allows the jig to fall on a semi-tight line.
When he detects that the jig's descent has been interrupted a bit prematurely he instinctively slams the hook home & boats a solid keeper, his limit fish and the one that puts him "over the top" and into the winners circle.

Why did the pro load his livewell & the weekend angler pack up & go mow his lawn? Is there some magical ability that is inherent with the pros, an ability that makes bass bite their lures even in the toughest of conditions? Not hardly.

It's what the pro KNOWS, and in turn what he DOES with that knowledge that often leads to success when other (less knowledgeable) bass anglers fail. As a "weekend" angler, adopting some basic principles of this knowledge will, more often than not, salvage trips what would otherwise get written-off as being just "one of those days".

First and foremost you, as an angler, must accept the fact that you will encounter times when the bass bite is nearly non-existent on the body of water that you're fishing. The notion that the bass must be biting better in another location or on another pattern, and the one that led the angler in the first scenario to spend his day scrambling all over the lake without
success, doesn't always hold water (or fish). Recognizing & accepting the fact that you're not going to have a fantastic day, and recognizing this fact as early as possible, is the very key to salvaging what may be your ONLY time on the water for awhile. Not many of us have the luxury of picking & choosing their fishing schedules & locales, not even the touring pros.

Recognizing when you are looking one of these tough-bite situations square in the face is one thing; Understanding why the bite is tough is another, and not something that I'm going to go into great detail about here. A change in weather-patterns is the usual natural culprit, the arrival & passing of a "front" (a substantial change in the barometric pressure, usually accompanied by a change in water temperature) in particular. Man made causes range from the raising or lowering of lake levels (a common occurrence in river-run reservoirs where big tournaments are often held) to spraying in order to control weed growth.

Don't despair, and don't cancel this weekend's scheduled foray because the weatherman says a front is coming through late this week. There IS a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, but you need to be mentally tough & believe that you are capable of boating bass in these conditions to reach that light. In a tournament situation, the "light" will come in the form of
a paycheck at day's end.

Let's go back to the pro in scenario #2 again; What we have to realize is that he won because he painstakingly committed his entire day on the water to pitching his confidence lure (in this case a jig) to locations (in this case docks, and lots of them) that he was confident held enough tight-lipped bass to fill out a limit despite the terrible conditions he was faced with. The word we keep seeing here is CONFIDENCE.

If you don't stay mentally alert on these days, you might as well be mowing the lawn. Our pro made hundreds of presentations to dozens of docks on this day, confident that he would encounter only five strikes. Think about that. Sometimes hours go by without so much as a bump on your lure. Scrambling under these conditions only further reduces the odds of you encountering one of the few fish that are catchable. You MUST remain confident that the next cast, pitch or flip is going to yield a strike. It's here that the difference between success & failure depends more on your ability to convert as many of these rare strikes into boated fish as possible, and this can only be done through intense confidence, concentration & execution.

We have the advantage, after years of biological & angling research, of knowing something about Mr. Bass that wasn't widely known a couple of decades ago. We know that bass have a varying "strike zone", and that they often attack prey out of a reflex response urged on by a prey-object suddenly appearing within this strike-zone regardless if the fish is actually hungry or not. It is this very habit that the better bass fishermen rely on when faced with ultra-tough conditions. For the typical basser this means that the odds dictate, that if they remain alert & fish hard, they will eventually present their lure in a bass' strike zone and catch that fish. Acknowledging the fact that the strike zone is often miniscule aids the angler even further.

The rewards are substantial once you learn to believe in the fish & your abilities to catch them. Keep your confidence baits in areas you believe to hold fish, and I promise that through hard work & perseverance you will begin catching fish on tough days. Sure, we all prefer to go the route of the quick limit. It's a blast to be on a quantity of biting fish in a competitive atmosphere. The truly accomplished bass anglers, however, are the ones that bring fish to the scales day-in & day-out, particularly when the tough-bite is encountered.

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