Have you ever tried to figure out why one type of bait catches more fish than another on any given day? Why one fisherman catches more fish than the other while using exactly the same bait when fishing on the same boat. Why are a bunch of fish found in one spot on one day then go back the next day and there are non to be found. These questions have perplexed fisherman for years. I bet you think I’m going to tell you the answers but I can’t. I can only ponder different theories and there are a lot of them. Some of them can sound like good logical excuses to fellow fishermen and even better to the person who doesn’t fish. But as fishermen we all know that sometimes no matter what you think you know and what you try you are just not going to catch fish on that given day.
Take, for example, this past weekend. I went out on Saturday morning at the break of dawn to fish the last couple of hours of the out going tide. Not getting anything on my fly rod I put it away and picked up my spinning rod and had no luck with it either, just a couple of very small trout. I then ran into some friends of mine who were using live shrimp and having no luck either. We parted ways and I was headed back to the boat ramp. On my way back I decided to stop in a canal to give it one last shot before I called it a day. By this time the tide had started coming in and the wind picked up. I was sort of out of the wind in the canal so I picked up the fly rod again. On my third cast I had a nice 16” trout. By the time I was done drifting down that canal I had five trout between 15 ½ and 19 inches. Then all of a sudden it was like someone threw a light switch and the fishing turned off.
On Sunday I headed back to that same canal and the fishing was hot, at least for me it was. Another fellow was fishing there and he had 3 trout using lures. I was using my fly rod and caught 15 trout a redfish and a couple of jacks, one of which bit off my fly. Who knows why my fly caught more fish than the other guys offering, I’m just glad it did. By the way, once the sun came out from behind the clouds the fishing turned off. And yet another good excuse of why the fish stopped biting.