Saturday, November 14, 2015
Adaptability is a word that probably doesn’t hit the tongue first when one is asked to list the top traits of successful fishers.
The ability to recognize, analyze and switch gears is without question a significant talent among those who day in and day out manage to bag their fair share of fish while others are struggling even to get one bite.
But “adaptability” might be preceded on many people’s lists of important angling abilities by talents such as fish sense, experience, eye-hand coordination and instinct.
That’s because the ability to adapt would seem to be so obvious that it’s an afterthought among those who consistently catch fish, whether they are walleyes, crappies, bass, muskies or any of a hundred other species from fresh water and salt.
But it’s also one of the great unsolved mysteries among those who just never seem to return from the water satisfied.
It would seem we have two general groups of anglers – those who “get it” and those who don’t. And those who get it are those who have a grip on the necessity of being able to adapt.
Adapt to what?
Everything. The weather, the water clarity, the wind and time of day. Tactics, lures, colors and sizes. Streams, rivers, estuaries, lakes and oceans. Depth, cover, structure, and bottom composition.
And that’s just the beginning.
Look back on your own experiences this past season. What worked and what went wrong? More importantly, what steps did you take to adapt to the day? What did you do to turn a slow day into a good one?
Failure in fishing typically is the result of only two things: You are fishing where there are no fish. Or you are not triggering strikes from the fish that are near your bait.
What you do when the fish aren’t biting is as important as what you do when they are. When they aren’t biting, you must adapt. Sometimes it’s as simple as moving to a new location. Sometimes it’s a matter of changing lures or tying on a new color.
But sometimes adaptability is important on matters not necessarily directly linked to putting lures in fishes’ faces. The batteries go dead. The outboard won’t start. You break your favorite rod. You snag and lose your most prized lure.
When calamity strikes, what happens next can be the difference between a wasted day and a salvaged fishing trip.
One day in September, my electric trolling motor fried out on the lake. We fishers take trolling motors for granted. They are kind of like shoelaces. You don’t think about them until they break at inopportune times.
But I adapted. Instead of throwing in the towel and going back to the ramp to load and trailer home, I decided to go old school.
I fired up the Mercury and drove the BassCat from laydown tree to laydown tree along a half-mile stretch of bank where I’d been catching largemouths.
It was harder work than you might guess – driving up to the tree, coasting in quietly, dropping the anchor, fishing the cover, pulling up the anchor, hopping down to the driver seat to start the engine and idle over to the next tree.
The reward? Two more good bass, the larger weighing a solid 4.25 pounds – a much better experience than driving home muttering about my bad luck.
Stuff like that happens when we’re adaptable.