Article by Capt. Mark Sampson
Have you ever fished shoulder to shoulder with someone and watch them catch fish, while you can scarcely drum up a bite? I see it all the time on our charters, particularly when we’re bottom fishing. The crazy thing is, if there ends up being one person who catches dramatically more fish than all the others, it’s not usually the person aboard who has the most fishing experience. There’s often something besides skill that’s bringing more fish to their hook than everyone else, and with a little close observation, it can be possible to reveal what they’re doing differently and help level the playing field for all anglers.
Even though you might watch your partner and conclude that they aren’t doing anything that you’re not, there might be something going on there that you’re not noticing. While fishing from an anchored boat with a bottom-rig that has the hooks above the weight, if someone drops their rig to the bottom and then lowers their rod tip or lets out just a little bit more line, the baits will lay down on the bottom rather than being suspended a foot or two above it and sometimes fish will be more inclined to eat if the offering is presented this way rather than straight up and down. Similarly, some anglers will just naturally lower and raise their rod in harmony with the rocking of the boat, thus keeping the sinker and baits relatively motionless on the sea floor, while others will let the rod tip ride up and down with the boat providing more of a jigging action with their bait. Here again, some fish will like it one way and some the other, and if you happen to be doing it wrong that day it might be tough to figure out what the problem is.
Sometimes, fish are in such a mood that they just won’t eat anything but the freshest of baits. Even though all the baits in the cooler are of the same freshness, after a bait has been in the water for a while it will start to get washed-out and lose some of its scent appeal. Imagine if everyone aboard starts fishing at the same time but go for a spell without any bites. Then one angler loses their bait to a crab and promptly replaces it. That angler now has the freshest smelling bait under the boat, and here comes a school of somewhat finicky fish. The guy with the fresh bait hooks up, lands his fish, rebaits, drops down, hooks another, rebaits, hooks another - and so on, while everyone else is standing there scratching their heads wondering how anyone can be so lucky and what in the world are they doing wrong? Because they’re not catching fish, they’re not changing their baits often enough to keep them fresh. Maybe a bite from a crab can be a good thing once in a while!
Experienced anglers will usually take the time to cut their baits in a way that allows them to be hooked and presented properly so that they look “pretty” in the water and allow for the best chance to hook a fish, while beginning anglers sometimes just hack a chunk of bait down to hook-size pieces, clump them on a hook and hope for the best. Although precisely cut baits are usually the most effective offering, under natural conditions, it’s probably more likely that fish feeding on bits and pieces are getting scraps left over from some other fish that was feeding, rather than nice straight cuts strips with tapered ends. So, if the guy who “doesn’t know what he’s doing” next to you seems to be catching all the fish, look at his bait board and how he’s putting the bait on his hook and maybe you’ll see that “pretty” isn’t always “perfect.”
While wreck fishing one day, it became obvious that even though everyone was catching fish, there was one woman who was consistently catching more and bigger sea bass than everyone else. She then caught a triggerfish, which prompted me to ask her if she was dropping her line all the way to the bottom and she said, “Yes, I’ve been sending it down until it stops.” But looking at her reel I noticed a small backlash was making the line stop going out before the bait got all the way down. She was fishing about 20-feet off the bottom and shouldn’t have been catching anything, but just by chance, that’s were the better fish were holding that day.
Sometimes an almost indiscernible difference in terminal tackle can mean the difference between catching or not. On a standard bottom rig, a slight difference in the distance the hook stands off from the leader or the distance from the bottom hook to the sinker can, for some reason, make a difference to the fish. Often, older leaders won’t catch as many fish as new ones because they’re no longer perfectly straight and free of kinks or bends. Older mono or fluorocarbon will also start to cloud a bit thus making them more visible underwater.
In some situations an angler might be catching all the fish just because of where they are standing at the time. On an anchored boat over a wreck it’s possible that one angler might be dropping their line down into a pocket of the structure that is holding most, if not all, of the fish while the other lines are soaking in barren waters. Similarly, if fish are on the move and coming from one direction, like down a channel or along a beach, the person who is positioned on the side that the fish are coming from might intercept all the fish before his buddies get a chance at them. Location... location... location!
Captain Mark Sampson is an outdoor writer and captain of the charter boat “Fish Finder”, docked at the Ocean City Fishing Center.