I am sitting at JFK airport ,waiting for my Lufthansa flight to start boarding and to pass the time i started to read the latest issue of The Fisherman magazine. An excellent Toby Lapinski article on matching the hatch got my attention, and made me think that maybe, just maybe we are thinking about this situation opposite of what we should.Let me lay out for you what i am thinking
No, this will in no way part from conventional thinking, in fact what i will suggest is that we are over thinking this particular scenario. The question in matching the hatch situation is quite often the same, how do we get gamefish to notice our lure that looks like exact replica of probably thousands of real live baitfish in the area. And advice is more of less the same, be that go with biggest lure you have to differentiate your offering from the real thing, toss a big pencil popper to get attention, work the edges of schools where bigger fish lurk or work away and behind the blitzing fish as biggest fish are more often trailing behind the main school. All of these are excellent choices, tested over time and chances are some of them will work in any blitz situation. What’s really got my brain to spin is circles is not how to make something work but how doing NOTHING might be the best course of action.
Here is my thought. We often have discussions of how our lure that looks like zillion baitfish in the water and cannot be distinguished by the fish. Therefore casting a bunker shad into school of bunker is really waste of time. I would tend to agree with this with one caveat.
Baitfish travel in tightly packed schools for protection so that gamefish cannot isolate one particular one to eat at will. And i am sure you have seen videos when shark or billfish attack a school of baitfish a big hole develops in the area around predator as the baitfish tend to move away in unison.This makes very hard for gamefish to isolate one particular baitfish to eat. Now lets say you toss your lure into a school bait
A)Af first the baitfish will scatter scared which will isolate your lure in the sea of baitfish and make it stand out.
B)If your lure is much larger than baitfish, they might feel threatened by it and stay away from it again creating an open area where the lure will be more noticeable than if in the school of baitfish
C)And last, when predator attack a school of fish where your lure is also in general area, wouldn’t that mean that baitfish would scatter and leave one single baitfish in the area that would either say “ i am too weak to move” or “ f#&** you bass”????
I guess what i am trying to say that by your lure being in the area of attack it will stand out regadless of size or shape by simple fact that it will not move in unison with live bait.
I really don’t have a “point” to share with you. I am kind of more interested to see
how many of you perceive this situation.
Because there really is no way of fishing the bait blitz.
Except one….Fishing on FB from your couch
ps..typing on ipad will result insilly number of spelling errors..as if i could write any othe way ?