PAY ATTENTION

We’ve all heard the stories of dedication told by Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. My favorite one is when Mamba (Kobe) is talking about his training mentality. This is paraphrased but you will get the gist.

“If your job is to be the best (basketball player) you can be, to do that you need to practice & train. Lets say you wake up at 10, train at 12. Train 12 to 2, go home let your body recover, you start training again at 6, train 6 to 8, now you go home go to bed and do it all again tomorrow. Now let’s say you wake up at 3, train 4, 4 to 6, relax and back to training 9 to 11, relax and back at it 2 to 4, relax and back at it from 7 to 9. As the years go on, the separation you have against your competitors is so much larger, they are never going to catch you.”

In my opinion Kobe is one of the best ever to do anything because of his dedication. Same thing with Jordan. When any one person is the best at what they do, who are they compared to across the world? The first answer is usually “they are the Michael Jordan of their industry”. Why were Kobe and Jordan the best? They were dedicated, but above all else they paid attention to the details of what it took to be the best.

Attention is demanded in serious situations, and to me fishing is very serious and probably demands more attention than any sport I know because on the water we are constantly dealing with change. Especially in the summertime, I see a lot of anglers lose focus (or rather show up with none at all) and they go on what I call “autopilot”. The casts are there, but the head game is not. Don’t feel singled out, we’ve all had this happen to us. I can’t be the best guide I can be for my clients if my head is thinking about what the Kardashians did last night, or how my fantasy league sucks this year. When on the water, be on the water.

Now, some may think “A cast is a cast, the more you make the more fish you catch”. There is some truth to this, but the false part of it is that it will catch fish every time, and that’s what it means to be on autopilot. Autopilot to me means we are making the same cast, the same retrieve, and going through the same motions every day, every wade. And that is great if we hop out of the boat and that’s what the fish are on, and don’t get me wrong sometimes it is just that simple but most times it is not. Almost always we do not just land on the fish and start whacking them as soon as we jump out, it requires a little more attention than that. Focus your casts on each kind of structure that your area provides and be specific with your retrieves, change it up from slower to faster, and be specific with where you cast in reference to what the bait is doing. That is what it means to pay attention. Mother Nature gives us all the tools to be successful on the water every day if we look and listen to her.

To help explain this, here are a few examples.

Last week I had a group of anglers that are up and coming fishermen, guys that really want to learn the game and be the best they can be not only with trout, but with consistent success on the water. We pulled into a shoreline that historically has held lots of reds and trout this time of year given the conditions. Despite not seeing hardly any flipping bait, I could see a few reds and mullet as we came off of plane so I could tell it would be a good wade. Upon jumping out we were immediately met with heavy tugs from several solid redfish, but after these we hit a dead period of at least 15 minutes. This is consistent behavior of a school of redfish however where we were we did not see many schools, more like scattered singles and doubles throughout a large area. So, the idea that we caught 3 right off the bat then nothing was puzzling. Walking along, I noticed a large mud boil in front of my guys and as we got closer, I noticed it was a large pod of mullet rooting around the bottom. Several casts around that mud boil immediately resulted in hook ups. The scenario now made more sense, these reds were corralling the mullet pods and using the “dust” as camouflage to ambush passing prey such as shrimp and small bait fish. This is very similar behavior to what we see giant trout do in the springtime, especially in Port Mansfield. The mullet were not necessarily the target, they were the hide, which is why we did not see many mullet flipping upon our arrival. Had we been on autopilot and not seen this, we would have walked right through them. Another note, this was during the “dead period” of the day, and what mullet we were seeing were shooting across the water. We had a few fish hit Coastal Brews but the better bite came on a topwater worked 100mph across the surface. Big blowups from upper slot reds and slot trout, you would miss a bunch but when you connected on a red it was usually a decent fish. Again, had we been on autopilot and not paying attention, we would not have figured this out.

This next scenario takes us back to Troutmasters a few years ago. If you’ve ever fished with me and talked tournaments you have probably heard this story. The sandbar we chose to fish that day had a long crest at the top of the bar with a somewhat steep drop off on each side. Most of our fish had come from right on the inside of the drop off so that is where we started. There was more mullet on the outside of the drop off but it’s behavior was not what I would call “urgent” or “frantic”. However, the little bit of bait that was directly on top of the bar’s crest looked like it was in a car being driven by Vin Diesel. Curiosity took over me in this situation, so I put on a floater and proceeded to stand up there in less than knee deep water, working the floater frantically across the surface. 5 casts in, boom. No surface dramatics, just a strong heavy pull. I did not realize how big she was until she came up next to me, with the floater hanging on by a thread on the side of her face. Definitely a fish well over 8lbs, if not 9lbs, and over the 30” mark. To make it short, I learned 2 lessons that day. Never leave your net in a tournament no matter how much you want to be a badass and “old man grip” the fish, and never dunk your Catch Commander scale even if you thought it was waterproof. I tried to grip that fish one time and she was smart enough to turn back and let the line catch my hand and she was gone. It didn’t matter anyway because our scales were soaked and we couldn’t weigh fish in so we were forced to zero Day 1. With our Day 2 weight (10.5lbs in 2 trout), had I landed that trout and we would have kept our scales dry, we would have won by an estimated 1.5lbs. I love it when 20 grand goes down the drain due to my own stupidity.

Back to the lesson. If I had not been paying attention to the location of the bait and had not matched the urgency of the bait, I would not have hooked that fish. Probably would never have had a chance at her. We could have just stayed out in the thigh deep water inside the drop off where we knew the 5-6lb fish were in days prior, and most likely would have ended up with a less than impressive sack. By paying attention to the surroundings and being focused on what the bait was telling us, we were able to capitalize on the opportunity and have a chance at a great day. Regardless of how bad I screwed it up by leaving my net on the boat and soaking the scales.

Morale of the story : pay attention to your surroundings. There are a lot of great trout fishermen in our waters but none of them are good enough to pull into an area and just magically land on the fish. What are they good at? Paying attention to their surroundings and adjusting accordingly to what they’re seeing. You can’t be the best you can be at anything if your head isn’t in the game.

Hopefully you learned something, or a lot, from this and hopefully you will be able to use it on your next trip.

I do have a couple days left for August later this month and still a few days left in September. Give me a shout if looking to book, the Redfish are starting to show back up in strong numbers and our upper class trout bite has been stellar all summer long with no signs of changing.

Capt Eric