SPORTS

Patience, persistence may be the best lure for fish

MARK SAMPSON
DELMARVANOW CORRESPONDENT

Mark Sampson.

So you’ve made 20 casts and still haven’t had a bite, or maybe you’ve made 100 casts with nothing to show for it. Is it time to change your lure? Patience! The very essence of fishing involves patiently waiting for something good to happen on the end of your line.

But sooner or later, even the most patient angler will likely quit waiting for something to happen and swap out whatever it is they’re casting or pulling for something that will hopefully solicit a strike.

From the armchair, it’s easy to say that if you aren’t catching fish it’s time to change your lure and try something else, and if that doesn’t work try something different again, and again, until you hit it right and start getting the bites you’re looking for.

But when you’re actually out there fishing, the answer to the dilemma of how long you should wait before changing your lure is not always so obvious.

Before making the decision to swap-out lures, anglers must first consider “why” they aren’t “getting bit” and recognize that the answer might have nothing to do with the choice of lure. It could very well be that the fish simply aren’t there.

In situations where the water is clear or the fish are up on the surface, an angler can rule out that the fish are not there because they can see them. But for most of the fishing that’s done around Delmarva, we just don’t know for sure if our quarry is there until we get a bite.

Getting back to the question of when to change your lure, most anglers will probably agree that the first lure they attach to the end of their line in the morning is one that they have successfully used before. In fact, it’s probably the most “fish-catching-est” lure in their tackle box, often referred to by anglers as their “go-to” lure.

Therefore, if anglers start out with the best-of-the-best on their line but are not getting bites, unless they know for certain that the fish are indeed “there,” seeing their lure but choosing not to bite it, it could make sense not to change the lure, but instead fish under the assumption that the fish are not seeing the lure because they simply aren’t there.

After all, you can cast every lure ever made into a pond, and if there are no fish in the pond you’re still not going to get a bite!

Rather than constantly changing lures and hoping to strike upon that “silver bullet” that catches you a fish, it might be best to just keep working the same tried and true lure that you know the fish have responded to in the past and move around, hitting different patches of water until you locate the fish.

Obviously, if moving to a new location is any kind of hassle, it would make more sense to first try changing lures, but if you’re working a general area, like maybe around the Route 50 bridge and inlet, it could at times be a better tactic to work your go-to lure throughout the area before you abandon it.

Unless I know for a fact that the fish are there and just not responding to what I’m pitching at them, I’m seldom inclined to abandon what I know works and experiment with something different.

Still, there will be plenty of times when the best tactic would be to switch lures. For instance, if the water depth or the strength of the current doesn’t allow the lure to get where it needs to be to get a bite, then experimenting with other lures would probably be a good idea. And by all means, if other anglers are catching fish but you’re not, it’s definitely time to try something different.

But just because you have a bunch of lures in your tackle box doesn’t mean you need to use every one every time the action seems a little slow. Sometimes persistence and patience with your old “tried and true” will end up paying off best.