Thursday Tips: Hands-On Approach

When the B'n'M Poles pro team of Kevin Jones and Billy Don Surface slow troll, they always hold their hands so that at least one finger is touching every rod.

"I'll feel a lot of strikes that I would never see," Jones said. "And I usually feel the strike before I see the rod tip move."

If either angler feels anything, he sets the hook. Sometimes that means coming up empty, but with slow trolling, you simply drop the bait back into place so nothing is lost, and they catch a lot of fish that they otherwise would have missed simply by staying in touch with their rods.

If you watch the hands of top anglers, you'll notice similarities in casting and jigging approaches. It might be a fingertip on the rod blank or on the line or something about their hand positioning that aids sensitivity. For some, it's highly intentional. For others it's more intuitive. Either way, it's something worth considering and imitating in many situations and something that can help you catch more fish.

Unrelated to this specific tip, I sort of forgot about Thursday Tips and intend to regain consistency with posting a specific fishing tip once a week.

Tiny Floats & Fussy Crappie

"Anytime fish get fussy. Like cold front conditions. Like we have today, in fact," Russ Bailey said, as he explained when a really small float can make a major difference. Sometimes the crappie want the bait just hanging there or barely moving, and the bites are so light that you never detect them with a traditional float. That's where Bailey's tiny pear-shaped floats come into play.

I asked if there was somewhere he could show me the presentation, even with the wind whipping pretty hard, so I could get photos and see it for myself. He said that was easy as he idled toward a nearby riprap bank and said that we'd probably catch some fish doing it.

That was an understatement.

Three anglers aboard, three float rigs and at times three fish hooked. Excepting when we paused for photos, at least one of us was virtually always setting a hook or landing a fish from the time we picked up Russ' signature B'nM Poles until the sun was gone from the sky.  I don't have any idea how many fish we caught in a short time and between photo sessions, but it was a bunch.

Making the fish bite and hooking them wasn't just a given, though. At least not at first, for me. Drawing strikes took a very understated presentation, jiggling the rod only enough to make the little float rock and maybe move just a bit and then leaving it suspended. And when the fish bit, they almost never took even those tiny floats all the way under. If the float move sideways an inch, changed angles or bobbed ever so slightly, you had to set the hook immediately.

I'm convinced we wouldn't have caught most of those fish swimming jigs over the same rocks or even float fishing with bigger floats. Russ' point was very well illustrated, and the lesson made for a fun afternoon on Rend Lake.

Draw of the Docks

I've just returned from Rend Lake Resort in Illinois, where I spent three fun and productive days catching crappie and taking photos with pros from B'n'M Poles. While I was there, I couldn't help but notice that there were ALWAYS anglers on every set of docks at the resort -- and that someone on any given dock usually had a fish on the line. They weren't big fish, necessarily, but everyone seemed to be catching their share. They were out there at first light, even it was 35 degrees outside, and they remained there when the sun went down.

Eventually I couldn't stand it.

Although I'd probably caught a 100 fish by the time we wrapped up our time on the water on day 3 and I had been out in boats fishing some of the lake's best spots with top pros, the allure of the simple dock fishing became more than I could resist. An hour or so before sunset on Day 3 I grabbed a B'n'M jig pole, tied a tandem rig with an Ugly Bug and a Road Runner Original Marabou, stuck a couple of spare lures in my sweatshirt pocket, and walked down to the dock behind my room.

It wasn't long before I was in on the catching game, and while my fish were no bigger than most others I'd seen, the basic dock fishing with a single pole in hand was every big as fun as it looked. I caught about 10 crappie before returning to my room, content and ready to begin packing my gear for the drive home.