Most New Swimbait Anglers Ask All the Wrong Questions

I was guilty of this when I first started swimbait fishing and probably still am at times

When I first started throwing swimbaits, I thought the best swimbaiters had all the secret tricks figured out. As I fished more, I realized they weren’t any magic tricks, they were just open minded, proactive and interactive. At the end of the day, bass are curious animals. Big bass generally fall under the educated curious animals subcategory. And the biggest thing I learned is every fish is different. So there is no “one way” because you are interacting with wild animals with individual personalities.

Sure bass all share similar tendencies. And as they group up, they all act more alike. But individual big bass are individuals. And how one reacts is not how the next one will react. You might catch 4 big ones in the same day and every fish acted completely different than the other. One wanted the bait burning. One wanted it barely twitched and suspending. One wanted up on the surface. One wanted it down 10 feet over a brush pile. Knowing that each fish is an individual should stop trying to ask questions that put every fish into one easy to label bucket.

The Wrong Questions

Nothing sells tackle like not catching fish. Maybe even more true with swimbait collectors. A lot of guys with big swimbait collections, generally speaking, don’t fish as much as the guys with a handful of super rashed up baits. I am in the collector camp here, so again not an attack. But I also have 4-5 really rashed up baits.

That handful of rashed up baits taught me it wasn’t about figuring out a certain retrieve, a certain specific swimbait or a certain specific body of water. Fact is big bass are on most bodies of water. A lot of them are never targeted because guys just don’t throw baits big enough to warrant their attention or get to where those fish spend the majority of their time, which is not up on the bank in 2 feet of water.

Most new swimbait anglers ask the same questions:

• What’s the best bait?

• How big a bait should I throw?

• What retrieve works best?

• When’s the best time to throw a big swimbait?

• When’s the best time to catch a big one?

The inherent problem with all of these questions is that they all attempt to generalize big bass into a group behavior when we already know big bass are individuals or they are generalizing big bait fishing. If there was one bait that worked all the time, everyone would just have that one bait. If there was just one time, everyone would fish at that time. But that’s just not the case. Ask any good swimbaiter, and they will tell you a bunch of their best catches have happened when they least expected them. And these are the guys that have put in thousands of hours of work with big swimbaits.

The Right Questions