Photo Courtesy Mac Jank – Laguna Fishing Rods
‘Last Cast’ is a Disease!
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I’ve seen it my entire fishing career, and I’ve even done it myself quite frequently not only when I was new to the sport, but even still as an advanced angler. It’s easy to get and sometimes hard to shake, for some this disease will waste hours of the day.
Early in my fishing career it was fairly excusable; Heck, I didn’t know anything. I thought the key was finding a good spot where they’d been biting the day before. I remember being quite humbled after getting on some fish one day and inviting friends to go on the next day only to waste several hours casting into empty, dead water. “Well, maybe they’ll turn on,” one of us would say. And every several minutes or so someone else would announce, “Last cast.” We said that over and over for several hours in one spot. How many of us have fallen into the same trap. I can’t remember the number of times I’ve said, “last cast” and still made another cast, maybe even 41 more casts.
Fast forward some 20 years and yeah, sure, I still say it occasionally, but it’s after the third cast in the area, and I know I’m not seeing what I need to be seeing to catch fish. Funny, I’ll still make that fifth cast, of course.
Now, if I’m in an area that should be holding fish, and I’m seeing the signs that could lead me to believe there might be fish there, then I’ll stay and fish 20 minutes. No fish—then I’m GONE! We waste so much time fishing areas that don’t have fish, and we wonder why we didn’t catch anything all day.
Speckled trout, flounder and redfish are all somewhat aggressive predators, and if you put a lure into or around one of the above fish on a decent weather day (not high barometer, post cold front days) then you’re going to have a fish at least swirl or short strike your lure. If I do get a swirl, or short strike, and don’t connect, then I’m going to change my presentation or my lure and stay… maybe 10 minutes more and that’s it. First I’ll increase the speed of the retrieve, sometimes lethargic fish will instinctively react to fast, erratic, fleeing baitfish.
Next I’ll slow down the presentation. There have been days when the fish wouldn’t eat a lure that was being worked but they did bite something that wasn’t moving. If that doesn’t work, I’ll switch lures to move somewhere else in the water column, likely down using a suspending plug or a bottom lure. And I won’t go through the whole box. I’ll stick with my confidence lures and maybe try two different lures.
What this all comes to is, “Don’t waste time when you are not getting strikes. Go find the fish!” And when you do find something, be smarter about how you entice your strikes, let the fish tell you how they want it.
Submitted by SunCoast Marine Works of LaMarque Texas field staff.
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