Bass on a Shoestring Budget

We fished at the wrong time. The weather was rotten. The moon was wrong. The wind was way too strong. Other anglers are fishing better than we are. These are all samples of typical excuses anglers use to account for their lack of success. But there's one that perhaps is heard more often than all the others: These baits I'm using just don't work.

"When we fail as anglers, the baits oftentimes bear the brunt of our anger and frustration," noted one angler I read about online. "We are quick to say that a particular brand or type of bait totally sucks and head to the store to buy 'good lures' that surely will outfish the crappy ones with which we just caught a skunk.

"Let's face reality here, folks," he admonished. "The baits we have today are head and shoulders above what our fathers had. Advancements in lure technology and effectiveness have been astounding. And yet we are prone to quickly proclaim a bait as an epic failure when we don't catch a fish on it."

This particular angler remembered a phrase his buddy often used. "Catch a bass on a boot lace," he often would say. And with that, the angler decided to perform a little experiment. He up and went fishing with a shoestring...and he caught a bass...and he took a picture of it (see photo above). He also had eight other bites that he intentionally took the "bait" away from because he just wanted to see how many hits on the piece of shoestring he could elicit.

"Please don't misunderstand my intentions here," the angler said. "I'm not saying that I'm so good I can catch a bass on a shoestring, and you can't. Quite the contrary. You can...for that matter, anybody can, if they simply do things right.

"Maybe we just need to stop blaming this, that or the other thing for our lack of success as fishermen and honestly search for the real reason why we keep coming up short. As long as we can convince ourselves that the only reason we are struggling is because of the baits we are using, we have no real reason or motivation to try to improve our game. Stop blaming the baits and own the fact that the fault is yours.

"If nothing else, try this shoestring thing. Done right, it looks pretty convincing in the water...right up there with a trick worm. And if you use your head just a little, there's plenty of rigging options, like inserting tiny split shot in a 'hollow' shoestring to add weight for casting distance. You even can color 'em up with a permanent marker. And finally, being cloth, they soak up and hold scent way better than plastic.

"Give it a try. I promise you'll never look at bass fishing the same way again after you've caught a bass on a shoestring. It kinda de-mystifies things. Instills that much-needed boost of confidence and makes you realize this shouldn't be nearly as hard as we try to make it sometimes.

"In the meantime, know that there's nothing wrong with having your favorite baits. We all do. I have some baits that are consistent favorites, and I have some whose stock tends to fluctuate dramatically. I also have some I don't ever like and probably never will. That doesn't mean they aren't good baits; they're just not good for me.

"Good luck with that shoestring thing."