| I
once heard a guy on an overnight charter telling a friend not to peel
the price stickers off the new jigs he'd bought for the trip. "They
like to see," he said, "how much you spent on them." The friend ended
up with the biggest fish of the trip, which disturbed me a bit,
although I don't know if he caught it on of his new jigs or not. Either
way, the fact is that lures don't catch fish. Neither do rods, reels,
line, hooks or sinkers. People catch fish. I grew up fly fishing in the Sierras and the inland Northwest, and I knew that there I could catch more fish than any of my friends, even with an identical setup, because I was a better fisherman. But when I started saltwater fishing at 23, during summers at a place my family had bought in Baja, it seemed like there wasn't a lot of skill involved. If the fish were biting, you could catch them on anything; if they weren't, you might as well forget it. It wasn't until I moved to San Diego three years later that I realized I'd been catching fish in Baja almost exclusively during "wide-open" bites and that really skilled saltwater anglers could catch plenty of fish even when I couldn't catch any. The untold hundreds — thousands? — of dollars I spent that first year in San Diego on the "hottest" new lures and other gear made matters worse, if anything. Eventually, I figured out that the way to become a better saltwater fisherman was the same way I'd learned to fly fish for trout from my grandfather — by working with a few basic patterns until I knew that if I didn't catch fish with one, it was because it was the wrong pattern, not because I wasn't fishing it right. Get to that point with even three or four basic saltwater lure styles and/or bait presentations and you'll likely be a better angler than anyone you know. |