Getting Better at Detecting the Bite
Hey guys! I began fishing at the club level as a non-boater two years ago and I've been steadily improving. Often I pre-fish the tournaments out of my own boat, a 14ft smoker craft with a 25hp Evinrude that I've put a casting deck on. Last year I had plenty of "first" experiences, from learning how to walk a frog and catching my PB 5lb 6oz LMB on it, to flipping wood lay downs and catching fish in less then 6" of water.
One lure I had a lot of success with last year was the tube. It seemed that on certain bodies of water I had a lot of luck with picking up the tube 3-5 feet and letting the tube pendulum back to me on semi slack line rather then "snapping" the tube like many of the pros here on bass u talk about. One pro in particular is Ike, many of the videos I've watched from him here on BassU recently have hit on many points that I've just started picking up on last year and want to continue to improve on. Many times I've failed to detect the bite on tubes because the fish picked the lure up and then swam towards me with it. When I notice the fish is on finally after reeling in the slack the fish often spits the lure because I didn't realize the fish was on and set the hook before the fish itself realized it was on when I started reeling down on the slack. It seems there's so many things that factor into why I'm not able to realize immediately why the fish was on, whether its the way my boats positioned in relation to the wind and the way the current is going due to the wind or how the fish are acting that day or what kind of structure I'm fishing.
One example of this is when I'm fishing a rocky bank with a 3-4 drop off 10-15 feet off the bank. I seem to do better detecting the bite in these situations.
Situations I struggle to detect the bite in are around grass lines and weed edges. There where several times when I didn't realize I had a fish on until I reeled down on the slack in the line and saw the fish come up then spit the lure.
In his video on snapping a tube, Ike talks about "letting the lure sink on a semi-slack line". I noticed that one of the breakthroughs I had with flipping wood laydowns was keeping a very small amount of slack in the line in order to detect the bite. But this is way easier when you've got a 1oz flipping weight on a tokyo rig in six inches of water. Keeping just the right amount of slack in the line on a quarter oz tube in 10ft of water while dealing with even a little of wind seems a lot more challenging. I've been trying to pay close attention to the the line but I feel like I'm missing something more specific.
I've heard other fishermen on YouTube such as "fish the moment" talk about how important it is to detect the bite and how new fishermen like myself often fail to notice when a fish is on. I've been told before "hooksets are free", and indeed I've caught fish like this but I'm trying to figure out more patterns and strategies in regards to detecting the bite. Any advice anyone could offer on this would be much appreciated, thanks!
It really comes with practice, one of the thing I’ve been working on myself is detecting those spotted bass biting a shaky head. There are times where it’s like you don’t even feel then but when you throw something like a texas rig lizard around rocky points where they hang they’ll crunch at it a few times instead of thumping it like their Largemouth cousins. It really takes a lot of practice and getting comfortable with a lure is when you will really understand how it feels when a fish bites it.
