The Old School Edge

In a fishing world loaded with technological advancements designed to give us a superior edge when it comes to finding and tricking fish, I still find myself stuck in the dark ages. My side-scan sonar is my pair of prescription Costa sunglasses and my recollection of the last Google Earth image I studied on my computer. My Power-Pole is a 13-pound Danforth fluke anchor with 10 feet of 5/16 inch chain and 150 feet of 1/2 inch 8 plait nylon rope. My iPilot trolling motor control is my right hand as it twists the handle back and forth on this old transom-mounted Minn Kota. At least my 200 HP Suzuki will get this 1987 Boston Whaler up on plane and where we need to go in a hurry. You know, she’ll top out at about 44 mph with half a tank of gas and not too much ice in the cooler. Yep! She’s a real nose-bleeder. It seems boats were made just a tad heavier 40 years ago than they are today.

Growing up, my dad taught me how to find spots by triangulation. Landmarks such as a unique tree along a shoreline, a channel marker, or even a water tower would get us very close to our desired fishing spot. Once we thought we were on our spot we’d watch the rafts of mullet to determine where the highest points of a reef or other structure were located. We always knew that the trout and reds would gravitate toward the bait, so once we zoned in on the mullet we would look for the most nervous portions of the rafts. That was typically where our targeted fish were holding. A small slick or two popping along the edge of the bunched-up bait would further confirm the presence of trout or redfish.

All of that nervous bait told us that we needed to be chunking topwaters to start our morning. Our topwater of choice back then was a Rebel Jumpin’ Minnow. My favorite two colors (in this order) were the Silver/Black Back and Silver/Blue Back. The Bone color was right up there at the top of the list as well. When the topwater bite would fade we would switch over to 51 Series MirrOlures and Kelly Wigglers shrimp tails. My favorite color pattern MirrOlure was and still is the chartreuse back/gold side/chartreuse belly – 51MRCH. If we were fishing in more than about 5 feet of water we’d chunk the same color but in a 52 Series. Our best color Kelly Wiggler shrimp tails were glow with chartreuse tail, red with white tail, and motor oil with fluorescent orange tail. God, please forgive us for the numbers of trout we killed on those baits!

It’s amazing how much more advanced our lures and equipment are these days compared to years ago. Heavy rods and reels have given way to ultra-lightweight, high-modulus, sensitive Waterloo Rods and long-distance casting Bates reels possessing the same feather-weight and sensitive characteristics of the rod on which they sit. Somewhat lackluster topwater plugs that seemed to be too heavy in the tail have now been replaced with lively, super buoyant, walk-the-dog style topwaters with the perfect high pitched rattles to entice even the most finicky of trout. MirrOlure has the perfect topwater for every condition. Period!

Soft plastics have more wiggle and more color varieties than ever before. The Saltwater Assassins that I use come in sizes and styles to fit every application. The Lit’l P&V works great when we need a small profile morsel that will cast a country mile, so we can trick those timid trout that seem to be in a negative feeding mode. The larger-bodied 6-inch Artemis Shad is a more buoyant paddletail soft plastic that will hover longer in the strike zone, making it extremely appealing to larger specks and redfish, especially during the cooler months of the year. The more traditional rattail and paddletail Assassin plastics cover every scenario in between. All of them come in more color varieties than I would have ever thought possible!

Speaking of colors, I can’t count the number of times one of my clients has asked what my current favorite lure color might be. For the record, I don’t have a “favorite color” soft plastic. I look at the amount of available sunlight, water clarity, water depth, and type of bottom habitat to help me decide what color gets threaded onto a lead head. In clear water with bright sunshine, glow/chartreuse and salt & pepper are hard to beat. This being said, if we’re fishing in clear water over patches of dark bottom grass, darker variations such as plum and Chicken-On-A-Chain usually work very well. Murky water typically warrants the use of darker colors such as Morning Glory, Red Shad, or Texas Roach. It’s all about shades and contrasts in a trout’s eyes.

Growing up, we strung our reels with Dacron or 20-pound monofilament line. The casting ability of such lines was less than great, to say the least, and the monofilament of that era had memory properties so prevalent that you had to change it out about every ten trips because it started looking and behaving like a Slinky. It’s amazing how we even felt the bites back then, much less landed anything. Now our braided lines have the strength needed to pull fish out of sticky structure while their smaller diameter enables stringing our reels with 150 yards, just in case we latch on to something like an oversized redfish, jack crevalle, or even a big snook, depending what part of the coast you’re fishing.

Oh, and thank God we had those little fold-up cards on the counters of the bait shops with tides and moon phases printed out on them. There were no smart phones, much less the interment, to provide us with the instant information that we have today. If we wanted to know the wind speed and direction at various locations in our area, we either had to watch the Weather Channel for local updates every eight minutes or call the NOAA PORTS phone number.

Having all of these top-notch lures and gear at our disposal makes fishing that much easier than when we were growing up and doing it the hard way. It’s kind of like that baseball player who uses a much heavier bat in practice than he uses on game day. His swing eventually becomes faster, enabling him to hit pitches he otherwise may not have been able to hit. Another example would be someone who chooses to do math in their head rather than using a calculator. The sharpness and muscle memory developed by choosing the more difficult route makes us much more organically efficient. Then, when we are able to use the modern technology that’s at our disposal, we take our possibilities to another level.   

My, oh, my but we’ve come a long way! I am so thankful to have grown up during the time that I did with the technologically challenged gear and resources (or lack thereof) we had. I truly believe it has made me a better fisherman because we had to learn the water by reading it and we were forced to find fish using our God-given senses without the help of state-of-the-art electronics or other modern day gadgets. It’s great to be able to use a GPS, but we should also know how to read a compass and triangulate our position.