Many Are Hooked on It, But a Few Take It to the Extreme

The "it" I'm talking about here, of course, is bass fishing. If you're not sure whether you're hooked or not, consider these typical telltale signs:

     * You don't drive by a body of water without looking for ambush points, schools of bait, or diving birds.

     * While golfing, you look at the water hazards and think, "I wonder if any bass are in there?"

     * You meticulously organize, categorize, and reorganize the lures in your Plano cases the same way you organized baseball cards when you were just a kid.

     * You show photos of fish you've caught to everyone you know, even though you're pretty sure they could care less.

     * When you close your eyes at night in bed, you immediately start dreaming about fighting big fish.

     * Stores like Bass Pro Shops, Cabela's, and Tackle Warehouse are your Toys R Us.

     * The one place you can spend all day without even thinking about eating is on the water.

     * When you have guests in town, your secret wish is that they will want you to teach them to fish... or that they'll leave soon so you can go.

     * Your DVR is full of fishing shows (and you still watch the reruns).

     * You're completely perplexed by boat owners who don't fish.

     * No matter what else you're doing, you'd really rather just be fishing.

Now let me tell you about a fella whom, I feel, takes our sport to the extreme. I came across his story while I was doing my own research on jerkbaits. He admits to "having a fascination with these baits" and says he has tried most of the suspending jerkbaits on the market. He says his "fascination" stems from wanting to know why one bait can be so red-hot one day but be so badly out fished the next.

He went on to explain that, in preparation for a tournament, he started throwing a suspending Rogue in clown color (see left) from the front of the boat, while his partner started with a Husky Jerk in the same color. With his partner catching all the fish, he decided to study his rhythm and try to mimic it as best as possible, but his partner continued catching all the fish.

Eventually, he and the partner swapped baits, and he started catching all the fish from the front of the boat. The next day, both he and his partner tied on Husky Jerks in clown color (see right) that had proven so successful the day before, but on this day, neither one was catching anything significant until the man on the front started fishing the same Rogue that had done nothing the day before.

These events really got the guy on the front of the boat wondering what would make such a difference. He wanted to watch their action in the water, but he didn't own a pool, and the nearest body of water wasn't clear enough, so he decided to do the next best thing.

He took a dozen of the lures to work with him and X-rayed them, in hopes he would find a major difference in the weighting/rattle systems of the suspending jerkbaits. He also wanted to get a look at the mechanisms that might cause a lure to "wiggle in place" while suspended, as one manufacturer was claiming his baits would do.

While the X-rays revealed a variety of weight-distribution systems, they didn't turn up any secrets. He certainly didn't find anything that would cause a lure to wiggle while suspended.

In short, the reality of his experiment was that there is no way to predict how a fish will react to a lure on any given day, which simply brings us back to this time-worn conclusion: "If fishing were easy, it would be called catching."