Fishing New Kinds of Water

Life is full of changes.

In fact, change is the only thing that’s consistent.

Two years ago when I started this website, my intent was to simply get better at fishing while reducing the amount of clutter I had accumulated. (Banjo Minnow, anyone?)

If you would have told me that certain changes to my behavior (which we have outlined in Thursday Night Fishing) would have resulted in a total increase of 10x in bass caught last season over the one before it – I wouldn’t have believed you.

Thankfully it happened.

Now, I find myself staring down a new challenge that I bet many of you can relate to. That is the challenge of facing new kinds of water.

To date all of my productive fishing has been done in lakes (both large and small) all throughout the Midwest, from Illinois to Wisconsin. It wasn’t that long ago we did a video focusing specifically on Illinois Fishing:

We followed this with a few videos on Fishing in Wisconsin:

Very productive… but now… no we’re looking south. We’re looking at property in Arkansas very seriously. We’re even looking at land and considering the possibility of buying a few acres and building over the next 2 years. This would mean spending most of my time fishing rivers, streams and reservoirs as opposed to my beloved natural lakes.

I’m sure some lakes are present, but when you look up Arkansas, you see things like Bull Shoals Reservoir, and The White River that flows beneath the dam – famous for year round trout fishing due to the cool, deep water flowing from Bull Shoals. You’ll see Norfork Lake, another man-made reservoir, and countless hiking trails and streams.

In one sense, this is like a dream come true. A guide I spoke with last week said they call Bull Shoals “The Lake of 5’s“, because you can catch a 5lb largemouth, smallmouth and spotted (“Kentucky”) bass all in the same day. There appears to be more water here than one person could ever cover in a lifetime – and this is only scratching the surface.

On the other hand… I have no idea how to fish for bass in deep water reservoirs, or streams or rivers. I have never targeted trout, or hiked a stream in search of panfish.

So while I am excited… I’m also a bit overwhelmed.

Fortunately, this has also pushed me to develop a few new behaviors that have been very productive – and also helped calm my nerves a bit. I started to spend some time every morning (literally 15 – 25 minutes) researching things like river and stream fishing. I started to dig deeper into the presentations that had worked to help me 10x my overall catch count last year, and this week I’m going to start to dig into seasonal movements of bass based on water temperatures in reservoirs.

I am also sharing all of my notes with you – absolutely free – so please take a look and share them with others if you like what you read:

Moving Forward

So is this an exciting time? Absolutely. Is it also overwhelming? Absolutely.

You combine moving with building a home or buying land with re-learning everything you know about fishing and it can make your head spin. But even though all of these changes are uncomfortable, being uncomfortable is a great way to help force you to improve yourself.

So let’s do that.

If you find the notes I am sharing with you helpful, please share them with others. If you have questions let me know – and if you have suggestions from experience regarding ways that we can all improve, I would be most appreciative if you’d email me and share them.

We have more work to do. Let’s get after it.

Tight lines!