Fishing tip of the week: – 11/11/20

Fishing Tip of the Week

Wednesday, 11 November 2020 15:16

Rod tip angle technique
by Mike Gerry

This time of year when you’re trying to control the depth of your moving bait presentation, the angle at which you hold your rod tip can be the difference of being in the strike zone or not. Believe it or not most baits respond to your rod tip angle very easily. If it is pointed down to the water it runs deeper than it does than if it pointed upward where it runs shallower.

Those of us fishing structure like grass, stumps, or shallow water, need our bait to travel over the structure correctly; correctly meaning to get your bait to travel over the top of the structure and use pauses to get it to drop into the holes in the grass or around stumps. Doing this allows you to cover lots of water without constantly getting your bait hung up by using your rod tip to control how you want to fish an area keeping you in the active water depth. The important thing is that it really doesn’t matter what bait you’re fishing; you can easily control the depth with most moving bait with the rod tip angle. Speed also is a key to controlling depth but rod tip change has more advantage to fishing moving baits than speed reeling as depth or fishing at the depth where the fish are feeding is key. You can still fish slowly with a high rod tip, where controlling depth with speed may not allow you to.

The thing many folks don’t understand is, many times, the strike zone may be on the bottom or up a few feet from the bottom; however, if you learn to use your rod tip to keep the bait at the strike zone depth then you have a great chance of catching fish. If you combine the angle of the tip with the correct speed of the reel you improve your chances of catching and you become a better angler. Another thing to remember is bass generally feed upward, although it’s not always true, but keeping your bait above their heads can make all the difference in catching. Add to that the up and down of the bait when you pause it momentarily puts your bait in the strike zone and gets you in position to catch some really good fish.

Captain Mike