Okechobee

B.A.S.S. will begin their 2010 season with the Southern Open on Lake Okechobee tommorow. As everyone, or nearly everyone knows the weather has NOT been cooperating. Yet the reports are for the temperatures to warm into the 70's tommorow and remain there for the rest of the week. We are supposed to get into the 40's this week, in New England, and hopefully this will bode well for the guys in FLA.
I can't help but find this funny, though, because a few anglers in Florida are reporting water temps in the 40's. The last time I went out in my boat the water temp was about 48 degrees. It was like being in Alaska, though in New England we are used to dealing with relatively long winters. Lake Winniepesaukee is 34 degrees, and that is about as cold as it will get, iced over until April. Yet a lot of smaller lakes down here, in southern NH, are still provinding largemouths out of the ice. I, however, will probably not be icefishing at all this year. I'll be happy to wait until things warm up.
And therein lies the irony. In Florida the fish will be spawning next week. SPAWNING! That doesn't happen for at least 6 months here! Think about that. It's a 24 hour car drive but only a 2-3 hour plane ride to most parts of Florida from New England. Wow. I envy that, big time. But that's the way it goes. Granted, a lot of this might be overstated (will the fish really be spawning?), but to those of us who deal with ice a lot of the time the fantasy is worth it.

How complex is fishing?

To most people fishing is nothing more than a leisurely activity, and while every one of us who enjoy fishing would agree that one of its greatest qualities is in its recreational joys there are other things that drive some anglers. One of my biggest pet peeves, which I luckily have not been exposed to yet, is someone who thinks that professional tournament angling isn't a big deal or all that hard. I was thinking about this because one of the things I love most is the challenge of fishing, so if there's a perception that tournament angling isn't worth recognition I'd like to show some people what it is they're missing.
Take a simple look at the tournament format: you fish for 8 hours, including travel time, and try to catch the five best fish of a certain minimum length (between 12 and 15 inches, usually). Simple, right? Well, if you add to that a launch time of 7 am, a lot of people would shudder. Then think that you are competing with a field of anywhere from 30-150+ anglers who are trying to do the exact same thing as you; and you are sometimes fishing on a lake that is in excess of 10,000 acres, making both navigation and finding fish an even bigger challenge; and the weather, as we know, is constantly changing, adding another challenge to both travel and catching fish; and while much of the technology of boats and fishing gear is advanced enough to not be a worry on most days, there is always the possiblity of having a boat completely dying on you while you are miles from the launch or losing your favorite bait during prime conditions. (This last problem happened to Chad Griffen at the last regular season B.A.S.S. event on Oneida Lake, and he was still able to win.) These are not the end to the complications for a tournament angler. Water clarity, temperature, surface conditions, low light, and wind also make matters difficult. So, considering this, who is the best tournament angler? I think the answer lies in something Rick Clunn said in an interview. When asked how much a factor luck plays into tournaments, he said that the longer a tournament goes on, in terms of the number of days, the less luck plays a factor. Makes perfect sense. The best anglers adjust to the conditions, including angling pressure. So, to make the matter perhaps more general, maybe the best angler is the one who makes luck less of a factor in his or her success.

Winter Practice

I've been meaning to practice pitching this winter, and though the cold is enough to keep me out of my garage (forget going outside!) I finally put in an hour today. I'm fairly new to baitcasters, yet I feel pretty comfortable with thumbing the spool during casting. I think I finally realized the difference in using the thumb when pitching, and the truth is that I am nowhere near as good at it as I thought. I know I'll never be a Tommy Biffle or Denny Brauer, but for my needs I thought I was well on my way. At any rate, it got me to thinking about just how to learn to pitch well. The answer came from watching other pros do it. When you see guys who are good at pitching you notice that a lot of the skill comes at the very end of the pitch, as the lures falls into the water. This may sound pretty basic, since the obvious goal is to let the lure fall in without any disturbance. Yet it involves training your thumb in a totally different manner than when you're casting. A lot of guys, when they pitch, tend to pull back slightly on the rod as the lure finishes its arc and enters the water. This obviously slows the lure down even more than if you let it fall freely, thus letting it just drop silently into the water. This is much easier said than done, and I found out that the lesson is best learned (for me, at least) a few steps at a time. First, I felt like I really had to train my thumb to stop a lure from a simple stand-still, vertical spot, without moving it forward. If you read a lot of basics about how to use baitcasters you'll notice they all say this is the most important part, and while this is true I also found that they don't say anything about the trick of pulling back on the rod. So I decided to learn that, from that vertical position. With my thumb on the spool, I let the lure drop, then as it was nearing the ground, I pulled back slightly on the rod so that it would slow down and I could control just how hard it hit the ground. After doing this for a while I also noticed that one of the keys was to have more than just the tip of your thumb on the spool. I felt like I had more control with the entire last joint of my thumb on the spool, so that more skin was in contact with the line and less pressure was needed to slow the lure down. As I would pull back on the rod I didn't need to apply more pressure to the spool--the backward motion of the rod along with the light but constant pressure of my thumb naturally slowed the lure down. All this coordination of different movements is what makes pitching so hard, but as I found out it really is only one movement with the other action of the thumb being a constant. The second part of learning to pitch well, to me, will be making the lure swing forward as it falls and learning to control its speed as it falls both forward and downward. I was trying to learn it all at once and it wasn't working, so I figured this would make matters much easier. Then, after that, accuracy will be the next lesson, and, finally, distance. I think breaking the technique down into these smaller lessons makes it a lot easier and less frustrating.

Conservation

Conservation as part of recreational fishing is obviously a very big topic and would take a long time to discuss. Rather than explore it in a broad way I wanted to mention a few things that occured to me while reading an interview with the outgoing director of the Texas state fisheries, posted on bassfan.com. One of the things he mentions is consumptive rather than recreational management of fisheries. The definition is obvious, as are the implications, yet the odd thing to me is how little acknowledgement anglers actually get for upholding and promoting the policy. I mention this because of the all the recent controversy over the recent formation of the Intra-Ocean task force. The implication seems to be that recreational anglers are as responsible for the overfishing of certain species as commercial fishing. The other compelling matter to me is angling pressure. He mentions that as angling pressure increases, as it must with an increase in population, the greater the need will be for stocking bass. He says that the concerns are more on the level of habitat, but he doesn't elaborate (is it a matter of polution?). I imagine it has something to do with the shift in climate, global warming and the like, and I mention this only because he also said part of the reason that lakes like Falcon and Amistad are fishing like entirely new fisheries is because of the change in water level, growth of new weed cover, and subsequent creation of new habitat for bass. Whatever the case, it is an ever-changing phenomenon and can only be managed with a dynamic outlook toward the future.