Interviews with great fishermen can be extremely revealing, if the fisherman is committed to telling us more than the importance of sharp hooks. We already know that we’re supposed to have sharp hooks, and if we read fishing magazines we know a lot of the rules of thumb having to do with color, body shape, stuff like that.
At this interview, David Fritts is cradling a DT crankbait with both hands and talking to it as if the lure is taking notes.
His eyes are open but he’s looking inward, paging through his many years of experience, trying to tell all of us what he does to catch fish. This is what we want, so on behalf of all of you there is a pause as the Crankbait King gathers his thoughts.
The table in front of us is strewn with lures, some of which are still tied to line that trails off every which way to rods that have been picked up and used to reinforce a point during the discussion. There will always be more, future articles with more ideas from Rapala pros, but in the span of about ten minutes Fritts crystalizes his approach on one of the key skills he possesses that separates him from others who would love to catch fish on crankbaits like he does.
It’s a subject we’ve brought up with him before. Sometimes we come right out and ask what he thinks makes him so good with crankbaits, without trying to push his thoughts in any specific direction. Fritts is hard to lead down this path, because he’s not unlike great athletes who think everybody else can do what they do.
After staring at the DT for a long time, he starts talking about how important it is to learn what each crankbait feels like when it’s digging hard, how different it feels when a hook is fouled, and even what it feels like when a fish is swimming up behind it.
When great anglers talk about things like this, it can sound like zen, but Fritts makes it sound like something we can all aspire to, and should.
“That’s the one thing you can strive for,” he says. “Try to feel what the bait is doing on the end of your line. You’ve got to learn what kind of vibration each crankbait has. You’ve got to go out there, on your own, and learn it.
“If you can’t feel your bait, I promise you, you’re not going to catch as many fish. I can feel when a fish is around my bait, just by the way the bait is acting. I guess it must be like when a racecar gets behind another, and how it feels different than when the other car isn’t back there.
“It’s not a huge deal that’s going to knock you over the head. It’s very subtle, but you can learn to feel when it’s happening.”
Okay, sounds possible, in theory. We can imagine the advantage of knowing that a fish is back there, so we can try different triggering moves, like a pause-twitch, or speeding up, or slowing down, or keeping it steady. We know, in theory, that different moves work best on different days and it all depends on the mood of the fish.
But how can we learn to sense this? Even when he does it, is it necessary for Fritts to shut out everything going on around him, in order to put him in a mental state tuned to pick up those subtle vibrations?
He says, no. After all these years, it’s just there in his fingers and his mind knows what all those signals mean, even when the other person in the boat is asking him questions, and it’s windy, and the boat is bobbing around, and he’s glancing at his watch to check how much time is left until weigh-in.
“When you learn it,” Fritts says, “you really don’t forget it. It takes a long time to learn. You don’t do it in one day. You may learn it in a year, but you can’t do it by reading about it. You can’t tell people how to feel.”
Beyond being able to tell when a fish is coming up behind his lure, Fritts also talks about the subtle differences between a lure contacting stumps, brush, weeds, rocks, and gravel. When you learn the differences, you can tell what your lure is bumping into.
There is more, and we’ll get to all of it in time. He also discusses retrieve speeds and the importance of contacting objects with his lure on purpose. (One thing: when it comes to bumping things with his bait, Fritts says that “when a crankbait barely touches the high spots, that’s what I’m trying to do. Say you’re fishing on a point that has four stumps scattered on it. If you wind in the bait and it just barely touches the top of every stump, but doesn’t hit anything in between those four stumps, that’s when crankbaits are at their best.”
Even with all the shortcomings of trying to learn fishing by reading about it, in many ways it’s enough to know that this is possible, that you should push yourself farther in your quest to detect small differences in crankbait vibration. Fritts says we can all get better at this feel factor.
We will always know when a fish clobbers our lure. It’s the little changes that we need to home in on. It might be necessary to get out in the boat by yourself a few times, to close your eyes as you retrieve a lure, to discover the small signals put out by crankbaits as they swim through the water.
Doing something new always takes extra effort at first.
But if you could become half as good as David Fritts, it would be worth it.
Note: This article was crafted by the Rapala Pro Staff.By: Mark Strand
