Sometimes it just takes a change of pace to draw strikes from wary stripers.
Years ago, I used to fish pretty much every spring morning with a small group of friends. Over those amazing years, one thing that would happen, it seemed like, daily, was that one of us would turn our head to talk, maybe swat a mosquito or greet a late-arriving member of the group and – in that instant – hook up to a fish. One of them, my longtime friend Don Robertson, called that, catching a fish ‘on the turn’ and repeatedly insisted that I should write an article about it. Further, he contended, that it wasn’t possible to perform that same act on purpose. And try as we might, we never could recreate the result of the spontaneous (and organic) turn.
I’ve mentioned the concept of ‘the turn’ many times over the years in my writing, but the above paragraph, pretty much, sums up the whole idea and that’s why – in spite of Don’s urging – I never devoted an article to it; there just wasn’t enough meat on that bone. But as time has passed and as I’ve continued to learn and evolve as an angler, I’ve begun to see more instances where that kind of change of pace has real value as a tactic and absolutely can be done on purpose with the intended result to follow.
You may know that I put a lot of stock in learning from other fisheries and other species, and I’m sure many of you have seen videos showing the ‘figure-eight’ method for catching a following musky or pike. Basically, if the angler spots a fish following a bait to the boat, they reel the lure up to within a couple feet of the rod tip, plunge the rod into the water and guide the lure along beside the boat in a figure-eight pattern; as unnatural as that is, it’s remarkable how often it works. But, when you think about it, there’s not much that’s more unnatural than a baitfish (your lure), being followed by a giant predator, and keeping up a steady pace and continuing to swim in a straight line. We all think our lures look amazingly natural, but that inability to deviate from following the line, takes something away from that perception. When the lure suddenly jolts in a new direction, it triggers a response, presumably, because it’s the first change that the predator has seen during its pursuit. I think they see it as an evasive maneuver and respond by catching it, ‘before it gets away’.
Now, with the flare up in the popularity of soft plastics, especially unweighted, we have a perfect tool for exploiting these two concepts to draw strikes from not-totally-convinced striped bass. As with ‘the turn’ and I’d guess many other dead-stick techniques, my introduction to this wrinkle of soft plastic presentation came by accident. Fishing a tandem-rigged, 12-inch Slug-Go the first year they came out, I was working the bait kind of hard and fast, standing on a rock at the edge of some water that fell off to 5 and then 10 feet. It was dark, so I wasn’t seeing anything in the water, but as the big plastic snaked closer to my rock, something made me stop for a minute, I don’t remember what it was. But after an hour of casting without a hit, my sinking Slug-Go was thumped hard by a respectable fish around the 20-pound mark.
Further experimentation revealed that this method is very effective, particularly when fishing in an area where you’re quite certain there are fish and the bite has been off. I liken this to the figure-eight; sure it’s unnatural for a baitfish to just drop dead and drift to the bottom, but it’s an unexpected change, which triggers that escape response. On the other hand, the stop works awesome when a fish is visibly blowing up a plug on the surface. If they are swirling, smashing and thrashing your plug without full connection, stop the bait! This may signal to the fish that its target is wounded or stunned and has now become easy pickings. Here’s a little tip for you too, this works great on false albacore that are following an Albie Snax, if you’re running out of runway, stop the bait and, most of the time, the albie will take it.
It feels counterintuitive to stop a lure and just let it sink, but this is where our ‘domesticated’ human sensibilities can hinder our ability as anglers. When we stop a bait, it stops doing what we think it’s supposed to be doing and that is seen as a mistake. But if I can instill anything in you here, let it be that we have to allow the fish to tell us when we’ve made a mistake. And we also have to consider what our actions look like from the point of view of the fish. When you do that, many methods come into clear focus.
