SITUATIONS · CANNOT REACH THE FISH
You know exactly where they are. That’s the annoying part.
Marks stacked on the screen at nineteen feet, or a bar you can see from the bank with a hundred yards of nothing between you and it. Sometimes it’s fish busting on the far side of a point that might as well be in another county. Finding them isn’t the problem anymore. Putting anything in front of them is.
Everybody’s first instinct is to cast harder. It almost never works, and it’s worth knowing why before you go buy a longer rod.
THREE PROBLEMS IN ONE COAT
“Can’t reach them” is usually one of three separate failures.
Distance. The lure really doesn’t travel far enough. It’s the one everybody assumes they have, and it’s the rarest of the three.
Depth. The lure gets there and never gets down. It lands sixty feet out and spends the whole retrieve in the top three feet, sailing over everything you were aiming at.
Duration. It gets there and gets down, but only touches the useful depth for about a second and a half in the middle of the retrieve. For that to work, a fish has to be in exactly that spot at exactly that moment, and fish are terrible at keeping appointments.
Each of those wants a different fix. Casting farther solves the first one and makes the other two worse, because a longer cast means more line in the water, more bow and more lift.
Watch what the lure actually does after it lands.
Situations · cannot reach the fish
Distance is rarely the problem. Sink is.
- never gets down
- gets down and stays
- fish
The coral cast isn’t a bad cast. It went the distance. It just never turned any of that distance into depth, because the lure was light, the line was thick, and the reel started turning the second it hit.
A NUMBER WORTH OWNING
Your lure has a sink rate, and you can measure it in four minutes.
Once it’s a foot or so under, a sinking lure falls at a roughly constant speed. Manufacturers almost never print that speed. You can figure it out at the water’s edge, and then you don’t have to guess again.
Drop the lure beside a dock or off a bank where you know the depth. Count seconds until it touches, then divide the depth by the count. Most jigheads and soft plastics on light line land somewhere between half a foot and a foot and a half per second. A weightless stick bait might be a quarter of that, and a heavy spoon might do three feet per second.
After that the math is easy. Eighteen feet at one foot per second is an eighteen count. If you’ve been counting to five and starting the retrieve, you were fishing five feet down over an eighteen-foot bottom, and no lure change on earth was going to fix that.
Do it once for every lure you actually use and write the number on the box in permanent marker. It’s the most useful number in the bag, and hardly anybody has it.
THE PART EVERYBODY SKIPS
Let it fall on a slack line, not a tight one.
A lure falling on a tight line doesn’t drop straight down. It swings back toward you along the arc of the line, losing depth the whole way, and ends up well short of where it looked like it was headed. On truly slack line it drops close to vertical and gets a lot deeper for the same count.
That can be the difference between reaching nineteen feet and reaching eleven with the same lure and the same cast. It costs nothing. It just means fighting the urge to stay in touch with the lure the whole time, which is a real urge, and a big reason so many people never really fish the bottom half of the water.
The catch is you can’t feel a bite on a slack fall, so watch the line instead. Line that stops falling early, twitches, or starts swimming sideways is a fish. Learning to see that is most of the skill.
Line controls depth too, and it gets treated like an afterthought.
Diameter is drag
Thicker line has more surface in the water, so it fights the sink and catches more current and wind. Dropping to a thinner line of the same rated strength can change your working depth by several feet without touching anything else.
Braid is thin, not heavy
Braid doesn’t get your lure down faster because it’s braid. It does it because it’s thinner for the same strength, so there’s less drag on the fall, and you can feel the lure dropping. The line itself floats, though, so a long belly of it lying on the surface in wind will lift your lure. A fluorocarbon leader fixes most of that.
Watch the bow
Wind pushes a curve into your line, and that curve pulls the lure up and toward you for the whole retrieve. Point the rod tip at the water, or under it. In hard wind, a rod tip six inches under the surface does more than a heavier weight.
FROM THE BANK
From the bank, you’re fishing an angle.
From a boat you can sit right over the fish and drop straight down, and depth mostly stops being a problem. From the bank you’re stuck with an angle, and every retrieve ends in the shallows at your feet whether you like it or not.
So make the angle work. Walk until the deep water runs parallel to the bank instead of away from it — a point, a channel swing, the outside of a bend, a causeway, a jetty, a dam face. From spots like that, a cast down the bank holds one depth the whole way back instead of climbing a ramp. It’s about as close as a bank angler gets to sitting on top of them.
And be honest about the ones you can’t solve. A fish suspended forty feet down in open water isn’t a bank fish today. Figuring that out in ten minutes beats three hours of heroic casting.
Which water type are you standing on? → Read the water in front of you →
BEFORE YOU ADD LEAD
Deep doesn’t mean bottom.
Check whether the fish stacked at nineteen feet are actually feeding at nineteen feet. Fish sitting deep very often eat by moving up — a lot of predators have eyes set high on the head, and it’s far easier to rise onto something silhouetted against the light than to dig underneath it.
That’s why a bait held a few feet above a school regularly outfishes one dragged through the middle of it, and why “I got right down to them and they ignored it” gets said so often. Try running the lure along the top of the marks before you decide you need more weight.
The order to try things in.
Cheapest first, one change at a time, or you’ll never know which one worked.
One. Count it down properly and let it fall slack. Costs nothing.
Two. Kill the bow — rod tip down, reel up the slack after the fall, and move if the wind keeps putting a curve in the line. Also free.
Three. Change the retrieve before the lure. Slow down, or add pauses that let it sink back to depth every few turns.
Four. Go thinner on line before you go heavier on lead. Thinner line buys depth without changing what the fish sees.
Five. Now add weight, or switch to a lure that’s built to get down there.
Six. Move. Find where that depth comes up against something you can stand on or cast along.
Where this goes next.
Depth goes first for a reason. Get it wrong and you can make every other decision perfectly, on water the fish aren’t in.
Depth, speed, angle and control → Back to Common Situations → They reached it and would not eat →