When I was young, I read many articles about the right and wrong ways to catch bass. Sometimes I had success doing things that were supposed be wrong.
As I gained more experience, I realized I was always better off doing my own thing. That proved true even though conventional wisdom might have been telling me I should be fishing some other way.
One of the things that makes fishing so special is that two fishermen can look at the same body of water and come up with very different, yet very effective, game plans.
When I research lakes online, I avoid information on how the bass were caught in previous tournaments. I don’t want to get stuck on something that doesn’t work for me.
To a great extent, this boils down to confidence, which is essential to success in our sport. You always have the most confidence when fishing with baits and techniques you’re good at.
Confidence plays into every aspect of bass fishing, even how you dial in your electronics. Not every pro opts for the same color palette and the same settings for things like depth, distance and sensitivity. But they all have confidence in their personal setup.
Kentucky Elite Series pro Matt Robertson takes this to extremes. He has a Garmin graph for forward-facing sonar, but he does pretty much everything else electronically with a Lowrance graph that must be 20 years old.
He has it in his head that it’s the best graph ever made and insists on using it. With all the advancements in fishing electronics over the past 20 years, I think he’s crazy. But he has so much confidence in that ancient unit he’d be off-kilter without it.
Sometimes doing something different can put you ahead of the curve and give you an advantage over your competitors.
When fishing with forward-facing sonar was just catching on, I would see a lot of anglers scoping some type of underwater cover. If they didn’t see any fish there, they would move on without even picking up a rod.
I discovered early on the bass sometimes hold so tight to the bottom you can’t see them with forward-facing sonar. I would catch bass from places other anglers bypassed because they didn’t see the fish that were there.
Unfortunately, that advantage has gone away because most of the pros are now aware of bottom-hugging bass.
I’m not saying you should get stuck on your favorite techniques and forget about everything else. You still need to have an open mind and strive to learn new ways to catch bass. But if some offbeat tactic you have confidence is working, keep right on doing it.
For example, I throw a ChatterBait on a medium-heavy Loomis IMX Pro 883 casting rod that’s on the lighter side and doesn’t have a lot of backbone. I match it with 16- or 18-pound fluorocarbon line.
I know another angler who catches the heck out of the bass on a ChatterBait with a really heavy rod and 25-pound fluorocarbon. That’s what works for him.
I prefer lighter line because it allows the ChatterBait to hunt and dart and work more naturally. I like a lighter rod because it loads up and lets the bass eat the bait before I set the hook. That prevents me from pulling the bait out of the fish’s mouth.
