As winter settles in over much of the fishing landscape, many anglers use the time to clean out tackle boxes, maintain reels and daydream in the pages of catalogs and aisles of sporting goods stores. There is another great use of your time: study of important concepts that can help you fish better next season.
One of the little-understood factors in fishing is the relationship between fish and the food they eatâ and how variables like abundance of food in an area and abundance of fellow predators can change how big fish respond to lures.
It’s a mouthful and a brainful, for sure. But listen to Rapala pro Larry Nixon and you’ll better understand it.
If you pay attention to this factor in the future, you will catch more fish.
One belief among top fishermen: when you have a lot of fish in an area and they have to compete hard for available food, that causes the fish to be more aggressive. Weather conditions and other factors come into play, but this creates one of those situations where fish chase down lures and hammer them hard.
But if there is plenty of food in an area (it can be insects, crayfish, smaller baitfish) and relatively fewer predator fish, that can change things in a hurry. That factor, all by itself, can cause bigger fish to become picky. If there is a steady stream of potential food parading by, why would a fish swim any distance to strike your lure?
It makes sense when you think about itâ but as with so many things, it’s never quite that simple, says Nixon.
He says, regardless of how many fish are in an area, or how much food they have available to them, it often comes down to cashing in when fish get excited. In fact, there are things you can do to induce excitement in fish.
“Excitement between fish is the number one thing that catches them,” says the Arkansas angler, long a legend among competitive fishermen. “They get excited busting shad, for example. When excitement is happening like that, you can catch lots of fish. A lot of times, it’s a matter of waiting for the excitement level to get at its peak, and trick fish into messing up.”
Nixon pays close attention to how much âbait’ is in an area, either by seeing it in shallow water or âmarking’ it on a depthfinder in deeper water. He then experiments with various Rapala lures and approaches to presentation, to see what produces best.
He tries to fit in with available food sources, and stand out.
“When fish are around lots of bait,” says Nixon, “you gotta find something that trips their trigger. Sometimes you want your lure to act like what they’re feeding on. Sometimes, you want your bait to be bigger or smaller (than the natural food). Sometimes that can get you bites.”
Sometimes, he deliberately targets bunches of bait and tries to create panic that stirs the predatory instincts in nearby fish.
“If your lure flushes the bait,” he says, “that can help you, because fish get excited when the bait is panicked and moving all over. I will take a big plug and run it through shad and make âem jump out of the water and that will trigger excitement and get strikes. Exciting the bait can excite the fish. Downsizing to a teeny crankbait (like smaller Fat Raps or DT series crankbaits, for example) can ignite strikes. I’ve caught fish other people couldn’t catch, by going very small.
“Or, it might be that your lure needs to closely imitate the bait, and you just have to keep it in the water until the fish go into a feeding mood and then you can catch them.”
It can become frustrating, especially when there is lots of food in an area and nothing seems to work.
“There are times when you see so much bait but no activity,” explains Larry. “There might be millions of shad, but you don’t see any movement from them. It’s hard to figure, but there can be nothing going on in that area. I’ve fished all day and had bait everywhere and can’t catch a single fish. I might leave that area entirely, and go find another area. At times like that, you might have to scratch out a fish here and there on isolated cover and just ignore the (hordes of) bait.
“Timing can be the key. It might be something as simple as being there at the crack of dawn, and it only happens for 30 minutes. There may be different answers, but there’s always an answer.”
Note: This article was crafted by the Rapala Pro Staff.By: Mark Strand
