Posts: 656
Location: Forest Lake, Mn. | Hi.
I just sent an email to a friend of mine who likes to go out and drill a hole in the ice, drop a line down, open a beer and wonder why he doesn't catch anything. I'm going to copy and paste that short email here...
Yeah, fishing is more than just going out on the water or ice and dropping a line down at least if you want to catch them regularly.
Just as deer relate to the edge of the woods or a corn field. Fish too relate to the edge, the boundary. It can be the edge of the weeds where the weeds start to grow in the shallows or stop growing in the depths. It can be the edge where the depth changes fast. It can be the edge between soft bottom and hard bottom. It can be an edge between water temperature, where colder water meets warmer water. It can be the edge between clearer water color and dirty water color. It can be the edge between fast moving water and slow moving water. It can be the edge between enough oxygen in the water and no oxygen in the water.
Every time you go fishing you have to find these edges, as you can see some of them change based on the weather or other factors and some do not like where the drop offs are, the edges of the deep, or the edge between bottom types. The more edges you can find and the closer they are to each other the better your odds are of finding fish. Location, location, location, just like in real estate. lol
One of the most important edges is the drop offs to deep water. Bars, humps, points, turns in the drop off are all this type of edge and they don't move or change size or shape very much. This is why a good lake map is important, and a good depthfinder and GPS unit nowadays too. Fish use these rapid changes in depth to move up shallow to feed or deep to escape and hide or rest. The really good fisherman can see in their minds eye a mental picture of the lake bottom as if the water wasn't even there. I can do this somewhat.
I used to play a mental game. I'd look at a hill with trees on it and pretend it was under water and I would think, where's the fish on this hill? The shape of the hill would be the bar and the trees would be the weeds.Fishing is as much a mental game as it is a physical game. You don't have to think like a fish because fish are dumb and they only react to what is around them. YOU have to think like the mind of God because he created the environment and the conditions that the fish react to. This is the challenge, ultimately, to figure out and understand how nature works... how God created things and there's no human that can ever truly understand all of what is going on in the water at any given time but at least sometimes we can figure out enough of the puzzle to catch some fish and have some fun.
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