Improve Your Fishing Ability by Learning from the Greats

A common adage amongst fishermen and fisherwomen is that 10% of anglers catch 90% of the fish. It takes almost no time at all fishing one specific haunt to realize that the old saying is based firmly on reality. Of course, there are anglers that fall all along a spectrum that ranges from the proverbial blind sow that finds a nut, to the expert fisher who manages to catch fish when nobody else is catching anything. No matter where you are or what you fish for, odds are there is at least one guy, or a contingency of guys who do the bulk of the catching. People will forever attribute it to luck, or having a secret bait or lure. However, the truth is, eventually the consistency of their success will disprove it as merely luck alone, and a peek into their tackle box would probably reveal that there is not one major thing they are doing to catch so many fish. Instead it is a long list of little things.

In almost all fisheries, the difference between an angler who occasionally stumbles into fish and one who fills their photo album, freezer, and punch card with their catch, is a meticulous attention to detail. The best fishermen are anal about the things that are important when you think about catching a fish. They use sharp hooks, high quality line, the best bait and the most effective lures. Also, many above-average anglers take careful note of the time and conditions during which they are most successful, or unsuccessful. In years past, the best way to learn the secrets of any particular fishery was to spend lots and lots of time on the water. Many expert fishermen came to be such by picking the brains of other savvy anglers and combining their ascertained knowledge with their own experiments to find efficient techniques.

Talking to the employees of a local tackle or sporting goods store was another way to learn what was currently working best- information and tips about specific gear certainly drive sales. While these methods of learning still work very well, today, the internet offers many additional sources of fishing-related information.

Reading online articles, not unlike this one, is a good place to start, but fishing bulletin boards and forums have become the wave of the fishing future. I am proud to say that I have learned many tricks and techniques from a generation of fishermen that will probably never post any of their information on the internet. A great amount of things I know about fishing I learned from others next to me in a boat or on the bank. Still, the increase in the learning curve you can achieve by reading other peoples' suggestions online is probably too great to overlook.

Over the past five years I have picked up countless pieces of golden information off of the web that have probably greatly improved my success rate on the water. Finding exact GPS fishing locations and directions to another person's favorite honey-hole might be a little much to ask. You are much more likely to find a huge collection of somewhat vague tips and suggestions. What you will find is a giant collaboration of little details people believe affect their fishing success.

I have spent an embarrassingly large amount of time reading and researching some such sites that are based and focused on the Pacific Northwest. It would be impossible to apply every tip that every fisherman or woman suggested. However there is a large collection of little things you can do that I have found to be very helpful. Hopefully, if you adapt these to your own fishing scenarios, you can improve on your angling ability.

In the Pacific Northwest, www.ifish.net is the premier fishing website and bulletin board. If you are not from the northwest, consider using Google to find a discussion board relevant to your location or your fishing preferences.