Article by Capt. Mark Sampson
In last week’s column, I relayed a story highlighting what happened to someone aboard my boat who didn’t have much patience. Patience is a trait that’s supposed to go hand-in-hand with fishing, although it doesn’t always go that way. But patience is something all fishermen just need to have, not just to keep from frustrating an aging charter captain, but also for their own success at catching fish. I don’t care who you are or what type of fishing you do, you can’t be a good fisherman without a certain level of patience.
Impatience prompts fishermen to make bad decisions. Such as in my example last week with the fellow that wasn’t content to relax and wait for the fish to bite. Fishing very often requires just that – a readiness to kick back and wait for things to start happening in the chunk of water you’re sitting in rather that blasting all over creation trying to find something to bite your hook. Run-and-gun type fishing is rarely a productive way to spend the day.
Anglers should try and consider some of the dynamics of what goes on beneath the surface before they determine a location to be void of fish and move on for greener pastures. And to “imagine” is about all we can do, because there is really no way we’ll ever know the cause and affects of what goes on down there because there are simply too many variables. Speed and direction of the current, height of the tide, location and movements of natural baitfish, clarity of the water, amount of light, angle of the sun, water temperatures, predator species – and the list goes on and on! Are the fish not biting because they aren’t there? Or is it because they aren’t quite ready? It could be just another half hour or maybe just five more minutes before the feeding frenzy begins – patience!
When sight-fishing on the shallow flats of the Florida Keys we’ll often pole across a patch of water and see virtually nothing, which I’ll admit is often an indicator to pick-up and move to another location altogether. But occasionally, just on a hunch or maybe because of recent action we’ve had in that area, we’ll elect to hang out for a little while just to see what happens over a short time. Sometimes what happens is absolutely nothing. But other times, and for no apparent reason, the flat progressively comes alive with fish that appear from all directions. The most obvious assumption would likely be that the tide has changed, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes it’s still rising or falling just as it has been for the last hour or so, but something made many different species of fish suddenly decide to pull up on that flat.
Whether it’s somewhere on a shallow flat, in Ocean City’s back-bay, or over one of our local offshore canyons, the dynamics of all that goes on beneath the waves that brings fish in and prompts them to feed may never be fully understood by any of us. There’s just too much happening, and so much of it is interrelated that it’s certainly beyond me! And that’s were patience comes in. If the fish “should” be there, but for some reason you’re not catching, it could very well be that everything is just not yet clicking the ways that it needs to be for the fish to respond in the way anglers want them to. But, if given a little more time, the action could turn on for the patient angler willing to stick it out and let nature run its course.
With the recent resurgence of tuna chunking, I’m reminded of how it was a decade or so ago when butterfish ruled and some fishermen would go an entire season without rigging a single ballyhoo or dragging a green machine/bird combo. Back then we all knew the pains of being anchored up on a shoal and wondering if we made the right choice of where to drop the hook. Every morning you’d make the best educated guess you could about where to fish that day, but if a couple hours were to pass without a bite you’d start second guessing yourself. Should we go? Should we stay? You wouldn’t want to waste time in a place that didn’t have fish, but in the same respect, moving would eat up fishing time and not necessarily put you on the meat. And the last thing you’d ever want to do is pull out of a place and then hear that the bite turned on just after you left. Worrying about what to do will drive a captain nuts and also prompt him to make bad decisions that often lead to failure. It use to be that there were enough tuna scattered along our coastline that if you had the time, the bait and the guts to wait it out, sooner or later you’d have fish behind your transom and then on your line.
So relax, kick back a little and have the patience to let things happen. That’s what fishing is supposed to be all about, not burning fuel as you run all over creation trying to find a fish willing to bite your hook. Used correctly, patience can be both a virtue AND an asset.
Captain Mark Sampson is an outdoor writer and captain of the charter boat “Fish Finder”, docked at the Ocean City Fishing Center.
