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 ?
I recently ran into a scenario where millions of sand eels were being harassed on a nightly basis by bluefish fm 5 – 8# & bass ranging fm 16″ to teen size fish. I started out throwing small swimmers & cocahoes since all I had was my light gear. Eventually I resorted to 4.5″ sluggos on a 3/0 twistlock hook tied direct to my leader. Bam, that was the ticket. I was catching fish on the edges of the schools of sand eels. Like I said, most of the fish were rats, but there were lots of them. Each night there would be a few fish to 12# that would hit @ my feet & my feet were standing on a dock for the most part. I’ve caught fish schooled up on peanut bunker w/ large Finnish style swimmers & big Polaris poppers, but when these fish were on the sand eels they wanted the sluggo.
↓One thing we all learned about surf fishing is thst no one rule applies all of the time. What ypu ate saying makes sense, but I would add no all bait blitz situations are the same. Sometimes tge bait is do thick the temporary hole created by the lure is immediately closed. Sometimes the bass are keyed in on one size profile and may ignore a larger lure even if isolated. Sometimes the bass are picking off bait ftom brlow so a surface plug, while more vidible, may go untouched. We’ve all experienced the above scenarios while fishing a blitz, so quickly switching types of lures, sinking, surface, large profile, small etc until one produces has worked for md in the past. After two casts into a blitz with no tedults I switch.
↓I agree with above statement and have seen Bass just zoned in on one specific bait profile. But with fishing thinking out side the box is always worth a try.
↓Interesting article indeed and definetley needs to be looked at. I agree with all the replys also.
↓We just came back from a trip to Cape Cod and couldn’t buy a hit, my friend puts on a VMC 1oz. Underspin jig with a 5 in. grub tail Keitech body in a blueish gray color and that was all she wrote, What was it that this lure was doing? it was totally different from the sand eels that we knew were in the area but, It Stood out, directly in the middle of schools of bait, I was just glad he had two jigs and some extra bodies as we caught fish until the plastic grubs were destroyed. The thing was that I tie my own buck tails and had Plenty of them that were Identical size and color in 1oz- 1 1/2oz, looked exactly like sand eels and they didn’t want them.