Your Fish are Gone....or are they?

The more we fish the more we realize that fishing gets tougher every day; it抯 not that the fish always move but many times you just can抰 get them to bite from one day to the next! I know how frustrating this can be, you feel like one day you have located the mother-load and you go back to the same place work the same presentation and you don抰 get a bite.

My solution: don抰 panic as many times the fish are still there they are just not biting or they have positioned themselves differently from one day to the next day. Your job becomes more difficult but generally not impossible; you just have to access the elements that they were holding on the day before. I start by scanning the bottom with my Lowrance Structure Scan, this will give me some of my answers, like have they repositioned themselves or are they just a few feet removed from where I caught them the day before. Once I do that my job becomes a lot easier as I use a sequence of steps to get them to bite; the first thing is to move off your spot some, back off another 10 yards so the presentation is longer. Slow down your retrieve as many times your anticipation of those same fish biting from one day to the next has you moving too quickly to get them to bite. Change presentation, often bass have moved on from a bait if you wore them out one day to the next, so do something different, like changing from a worm to a jig maybe the bulky presentation is just subtle enough to get them to bite. Many times angles can be everything, so change your approach to a different angle where your fishing the fish differently but they are in the same spot, water current changes their body position and many times working the same spot from a 180 degree different angle puts the bait in front of them and gets you hooked up again.

Lastly do a little fishing on the edges of the structure they were on in other words work the contour change that surrounds your spot, they may have just relocated to a different contour break, so look for that first drop or ledge near your fish. There are no secrets but be intuitive and I believe you will find your fish again.