What Pros Don’t Tell You About Offshore Bass Fishing | Lake Hamilton Tournament Day December 2019

Can you recommend a more economic version of the jerk bait your using

i think bass have gone extinct in lewis smith Al

It's funny, it always seemed when I used to fish tournaments that the people who were on them offshore were the ones least affected by changes in conditions.

Love your videos, best information out there. I am a novice bass fisherman, can you please tell me just a few bullet points.
Sunny or cloudy
Pressure rising or falling
What side of the lake when windy
Thank you and keep the video's coming. You should make a few videos on all grass lakes. I fish Portage lakes in Akron Ohio and our lakes are nothing like yours

On those days stick with what works. You cought fish working the bank they were small but you might have got a few big ones had you stuck to it.

Echoing the kudos of others here, no doubt. But speaking not as another offshore-addict (may God bless us, every one, lol), but as a former fisheries biologist and aquatic ecologist?

THE supremo law of all angling, anywhere, anytime, anyhow, boils down to one very simple reality: fish are either active, or they are not active! And as a practical matter, there's not really all that much we as anglers can do to change their most fundamental status.

It may help our psyches to learn to apply the 'serenity prayer' to our outings, and realize that fish are NOT like us in this key regard: a fish does NOT become active in order to feed (which me do, sooner rather than later). But active fish feed.

What does that mean? It means we can't project our M.O. on our targets, that's what!

There is a cumulative theoretical scope for activity, which might be thought of as a minimum set of environmental threshholds (including such ever- varying factors as light intensity, wind speed and direction, current speed and directios, dissolved oxygen, all to be considered in the context of cyclical weather patterns circumstances, along with the presence or absence of disturbances – as well as directional trends thereof) which either satisfy, or do not sufficiently satisfy the fish's instinctual programming, in order to 'flip its behavioral switch' from 'OFF' (which is NORMAL in stillwater environments, for cold-blooded creatures) to 'ON' (at which point, assuming our efforts supply appropriate and necessary triggering, a fish at least becomes catchable (for an indeterminate time).

Yes, that's a mouthful. But that's what it takes before we ought even expect before we 'get bit'. Any angler worthy of that title has had this switch-flipping experience. Perhaps without our changing a thing we are doing or where we are doing it (i.e without changing our lure presentation or our location), suddenly we can do no wrong (or vice versa), right?

True, the fish may have just appeared on the scene, but for many species (being less mobile in non-tidal freshwater settings), odds are they were more or less present the entire time, and simply had a change of attitude ('somebody's home, and now their lights came on/off').

They did not all of a sudden up and swim on or off from the other end of the lake, although it might be prudent for us to considering cutting our losses of time/effort/energy/resolve and relocating to a place where the environmental cards being dealt at the moment ARE more conducive to fish activity (which might be as simple as merely switching to the opposite bank, where a ripple is present, or may require a wholesale change of our program.

Point is, we can only control what we can control, and coming to terms with that (between our ears) is essential – not merely in any competetive context, but simply in terms of enjoying our recreation.

What i love about this guy, is how neither his egi, nor his accomplishments, eclipse his enthusiasm for the sport. He's honest about fishing being what it is: the pursuit of catching, and that there are unavoidable dues one must be willing to pay for objective success to follow.

The one thing we can control? Accepting how no matter what, doing what what we can in order to fish well (with or without there being a high degree of catching 'in the moment'), may as well be considered its own reward.

Slow to non-existent bites happen to everyone who wets their line routinely (even if in a pond we may know like the back of our hand, where the fish are corraled! ). And that's what keeps playing the game interesting.

Glad to have this young man sharing his God-given gifts!

"The curse of not being able to catch anything over 12 lbs". LOL. Enjoyed the video.

Hamilton’s a tough one. Next time do what a friend of mine used to do on tournaments there. Have someone waiting at another ramp somewhere, load up, go to Ouachita, catch your fish, go back to Hamilton and weigh in.

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Hope the tourney has a good purse, cause you burning some gas! ⛽ No current, when the fish scatter, stick to jerkbaits, and finnesse style baits. And fish slow

Excellent breakdown of the day with the video. You have the best continent demonstrating your thought process. Seems this day was kind of the opposition of “fish the moment”… “had the worst possible conditions to fish offshore… so I fished offshore.”

Sounds more like “fish the plan”.

Gotta figure out the adjustments to make to get those fish in the boat. “Hope and Pray” isn’t really the answer… but hindsight is 20/20 and if it were truly that easy, there’d be a whole lot more people catching big bags of fish. Keep up the good work.

I fish current lakes also and on days like that, even without wind I take a spinnerbait and burn banks. Our fish scatter out in calm cloudy days. It's pretty consistent on catching fish . Definitely not alot of fish but bigger than normal.

People would be better at fishing if they watched your videos more. Very unique content that goes in depth on how you fish. Keep it up!

It's called 'Fishing' and not 'catching' for a reason! 🙂 Love the videos..keep up the great work.

Great video, so much more realistic than most. I agree dropping the spoon can sometimes get those zombie schools to waken up. Txu!