Hite: 6 new terms for spot stealing

Things start to get a little wonky on the second day of a tournament when everyone knows who is on productive areas and who is not.

There is little doubt that open-water fishing has become more of the norm in bass tournaments these days. Thanks to the incredible advancements in electronics and GPS mapping, entire tournaments are started and finished offshore.

Whether it’s TVA lakes, the Great Lakes or even vast grass flats in Florida lakes, the name of the game is finding schools of quality fish relating to something in open water.

But, as we have all seen by now, open-water fishing is a bit more open-ended, so to speak.

Tournament leaders are often easy to spot out in the “middle of nowhere” and there are no lines or boxes painted on the water that define the exact area leaders are utilizing. Again, it’s open-ended, and as a result, anglers sort of come and go as they please. With so many talented anglers on the Bassmaster Elite Series, we sometimes find the same fish and having company is part of the process. It all operates on a kind of honor system: I know you were fishing here and you know I was fishing here. And it all works out – for the most part.

Where things start to get a little wonky is on the second day of a tournament when everyone knows who is on productive areas and who is not. This is just about the time funny business starts to brew. And when I say funny business, I mean boats that were not in the mix on the juice the first day start to…sort of…kind of…encroach (but not really) on the juicier spots.

Now what makes these attempted encroachments so humorous to me is they give the illusion that they are fishing away from the juice when, in reality, they are inconspicuously moving towards the juice. In other words, the bow of the encroacher’s boat is never pointing directly at the guy catching all the fish, but somehow is always inching closer to him.

Over the years I’ve seen so many of these creative encroachments that I actually have named a few of them.

It all starts with a move I call the Charade Shutdown. This usually occurs a couple hundred yards from a productive area where tournaments leaders are fishing. It’s kind of a safe, soft entry into the area that’s far enough away that it says, “Hey, I’m not here to fish where you guys are fishing; I’ve got something of my own going on over here.”

The first red flag that a Charade Shutdown is in full effect is that everyone who is legitimately already on the juice knows there is absolutely nothing over there where the guy is attempting to fish.

Then the angler begins to make what appear to be big circles around the outside of the productive area. But upon closer inspection you realize that he is actually working around in a spiral that brings him closer and closer on every pass. I have aptly named this maneuver the Death Spiral.

Sometimes after a Charade Shutdown an angler will fish down and around the outside of the premium area, almost like a big L, then suddenly decide he wants to fish his way back towards where he started, kind of forming a hypotenuse to a triangle that goes right through the productive area. I call this the Hypotenuse to the Juice.

Another popular one I’ve observed over the years is what I named the S-Wave. In this strategic maneuver, the angler begins making a series of exaggerated S patterns back and forth – as if he is searching for something – but at the same time he is also moving at a perpendicular angle right towards the anglers catching fish.

Of course you also have the Drifter. In this classic move the encroacher craftily plays the winds and currents to his favor. He does a Charade Shutdown a couple hundred yards upwind or up current of the juice, then suddenly decides to sit down in his boat, open the rod lockers and retie every rod in the boat. About the time he stands up to fish  – low and behold he is right in the mix.

A new one I observed this year and added to the collection is the Moonwalk. With this, the angler basically tries to back in a little closer to the action by going in reverse on the trolling motor while drop-shotting. Watching a guy get closer to you while his bow is pointed away is a pretty funny one.

The good news is, in the long run, these maneuvers never really work out too well for the creative encroacher, but it sure does provide for some comical entertainment while it’s happening.