Transcript: Five Fishing Techniques Provento Make Sure You Feel the Bite!

HadleyFive Fishing Techniques Provento Make Sure You Feel the Bite!Presented by Lawrence GuntherDate June 26th, 2013

IntroductionYou’re listening to Seminars@Hadley. This seminar is “Five Fishing Techniques Proven to Make Sure You Feel the Bite” Presented by Lawrence Gunther, moderated by Larry Muffet.

Larry MuffetWelcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Larry Muffet, I’m a member of Hadley’s Seminar team and I also work in matricular affairs and veteran’s outreach. Today’s seminar topic is “Five Fishing Techniques Proven to Make Sure You Feel the

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Bite.” Our presenter today is an internationally renounced blind competitive fisher, writer, speaker, and radio show host. Lawrence Gunther will be sharing with you some of his favorite techniques for fishing more by feel than by sight. So now let me welcome Lawrence and I’m going to turn things over to him so he can go ahead and get started. Lawrence?

Lawrence GuntherThank you very much, Larry. Thanks for having me on again. I was on this three or four years ago and people still mention it to me that they heard it. And so it’s a pleasure to be back and I think this topic, what we got today about my five favorite feel the bite techniques that I use in my seminars and more importantly in my tournament fishing. I fish about twenty five competitive tournaments a year.

One of those tournaments is a blind fishing tournament that has about, this year there were thirty-five boats and we had teams of sighted and unsighted people in each boat. And it was the biggest pike, biggest walleye, and my team won the biggest pike for the second year in a row. So

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what I’m going to tell you here folks, there’s some validity to it. And I fish the other twenty-four or so tournaments I do every year are against sighted people in fields as many as 150 boats. And these are walleye tournaments and bass tournaments mainly. I also do some pike and musky and trout.

I did a trout tournament in Colorado, in Breckenridge. It was the America International Fly Fishing Cup and did pretty good in that. I had someone with me on that. And I don’t recommend fly fishing as the ultimate sport for blind people, that’s for sure. That fly will get stuck into just about everything you can possibly imagine, including the back of your head whenever it gets a chance. It’s just the act of fly-fishing, you’re waiving this wand above your head. The weight of the line is carrying the fly because the fly has actually almost now weight whereas all the other types of casting, it’s the weight of bait that pulls the line off the reel. With fly-fishing it’s the weight of the line that pulls the bait through the air and lands it where you want it to land and not in the trees, grass, shrubs, or other people’s heads.

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Anyways, that’s that. Just before we get into the five techniques that I like to use I thought that maybe we should just touch quickly on the three basic types of fishing rods. Push button fishing rod is probably the one most people are familiar with. It’s the one that most people start fishing with. It’s a closed face, or push button, or spin cast. Those are the three sort of names. They all relate to that beer can shaped fishing reel that has a handle on the side, a button at the back and a little hole at the front where the line comes out. It was developed by the Zero Bomb Corporation, or otherwise known as Zebco back in the 1930’s because the owner of Zebco really liked fishing and he wanted to do something different.

So it’s a great little reel and it’s great for two things. One is the push button reel isn’t that easily tangled. But the other big thing I like about it is when you’re reeling the line back in you can keep your hand on the rod in front of the reel and you can actually hold the line between your thumb and your finger as you’re reeling, as you’re pausing, as you’re waiting to help you feel the bite. So there are some good push button reels on the market. Zebco makes some really nice ones. They’re a little

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bit pricey, they get into around the $50 range, but they’re good quality reels and they’ll last you a lifetime if you take care of them.

The next kind of most popular fishing outfit is the spinning. Now the spinning, we call it spinning, in Europe they call it fixed spool because the spool doesn’t move. The spool is stationary. And the end of the spool is facing the guides or is in parallel with the rod itself. And then there’s an arm or a bail arm, they call it, that turns and revolves around the spool and it collects the line and wraps it onto the spool.

To release the line, you flip that bail arm over. It locks in the open position, then you hold with your finger, lift the rod back to about the two o’clock position, bring it forward to about the ten or eleven o’clock position, release the line that you’re holding with your finger and then the line just flies off the end of the spool. And it’s a great way to cast light line, light lures a tremendous distance. It’s also very accurate casting.

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The only downside about spinning is if you’re trying to do something where you want to feel the line as you’re reeling in. You’ve got your hand on the rod and the reel is hanging down below, quite a distance below your hand, and then your other hand is holding the fishing reel handle and you’re reeling and so you don’t really have a chance to hold the line. And because it’s making these big loops as it’s wrapping the line back on the spool, you can’t really pass it through your finger.

It just doesn’t work that well so when you’re using it for retrieving, just chucking and retrieving, chucking and retrieving, just straight crank baits or spinner baits which is what we’re going to talk about in a second, it’s not a bad system. But if you want to fish something with a little more finesse like a worm or something where you want to feel the bite, it’s a little trickier because you just can’t get access to the line.

And then the third type is the bait caster. It’s the levelwinde or bait caster and that’s the one where the spool is perpendicular to the rod. And then it’s got, it’s like a winch. It’s like a little mini winch with a handle on the side. You turn the handle, it spins

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the spool, and the spool reels in the line, just like a winch pulling on a tow truck. And then to release a line, you press a button, it puts the spool in free mode, free spool mode, and then you again hold the rod back at two o’clock, release it at ten, eleven o’clock or so and the spool spins as the weight of the lure pulls the line and the line pulls off the spool, and the spool spins.

Now the only tricky part with that is if that spool starts spinning too fast or your lure stops coming out, that spool just keeps spinning and then you end up with what we call a professional lure run, but what looks more like a bird’s nest. And that can be a little tricky to undo. Now mind you I always manage to get my bird’s nest untangled except maybe one a year and I do use bait casters and once their set up properly they’re totally usable by blind people for sure. It’s just a matter of making some adjustments to the screws and settings and you can use them.

And they’re very nice. They’re some of the better quality reels on the market for sure. It gives you the chance to hold the line as it is going into the reel just like you can with the closed face reel or

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the Zipco. So you have more control and you have a good strong drag system. And you can really use heavy lines on that so you can really fish in the junk like in the really heavy weeds and stuff where you’re going to need that winch to pull those fish out. So it’s a good system if you want to really get into those bass and that heavy cover. That’s the one you want and you want to learn how to do that.

On my website blindfishingboat.com there is an article about how to use, how to learn how to bait cast. So visit that if you’re interested in learning how to use these bait casters, these levelwinde reels and it will give you step by step instructions on how to select a bait caster and how to learn how to cast with a bait caster.

Larry, is this a good time to take a question or should we move on?

Larry MuffetLet’s go a few more minutes and then we’ll take some questions but if people are looking to ask questions it would be a good time to start thinking

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them and putting them in the text box and I’ll relay them along. So yeah, let’s go on for a few more minutes.

Lawrence GuntherOkay, sounds good. So the, let’s talk about my favorite types of fishing lures now and my favorite fishing techniques. Now there’s one lure, it’s called the spinner bait and it’s, some people call it a safety pin type lure because it looks like a safety pin that’s popped open. And you know where the ring is on a safety pin, the circley part, you know in the middle of a safety pin where one part leaves to the pin and the other side of it leaves to the clasp. Well that’s where you would tie your fishing line. And then at the end of the pointy end would be one or two little blades that would spin in the water when you’re retrieving it. And at the other end where the clasp would be on that safety pin would be a lead headed jig. So it’s got a little lead head, a feathery skirt behind the head, and a single large hook that’s connected to the lead head.

And what this lure represents is a school of fleeing minnows and it’s a very effective little tool because

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it’s also very weedless. You can chuck this in pretty well everything, everywhere you can imagine, even up in the tree branches and generally get it out again. So this is my search lure, like if I’m fishing in a body of water in my kayak or my [portaboat] and no one’s around and I have no idea what to expect when I cast out, I’ll start with very short casts using my spinner bait and I’ll circle my boat 360 degrees using the same distance to cast and I will not let it sink far.

So just as the lure hits the water, I’ll stop the line right away and I’ll almost stop the line just before it hits the water and I’ll almost start retrieving as the lure is touching down on the water. So this bait is just below the surface and that tells me if there’s going to be any weeds sticking up or lilypads or any type of weed. So if it’s really shallow it doesn’t matter. I can fish this so close to the surface, it doesn’t matter how weedy the water is, it’ll just skim along the top and you can get some pretty explosive strikes that way from bass, pike, walleye, you name it, the fish love these things all depending on the size.

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A good friend of me fishes these a lot and I asked him, he’s a tournament fisher as well and he does very well and I remember asking him I said, “Charles, what’s your favorite color spinner bait?” He said, “Oh I like them all,” he said, “As long as they’re white.” So you really don’t need a lot of spinner baits in tackle box as long as they’re white. And my favorite, of course, is a white one with a white head and a white skirt and two silver willow leaf blades, one a little bit bigger than the other. And that’s nice, you can retrieve that fast or slow, but it seems to work.

Now the best time to throw a spinner bait is in the morning before the sun gets up really blazing hot or at the end of the day with the sun going down. If it’s a flat, calm, bluebird day and there’s not a ripple on the lake, throwing a spinner bait near the surface of the lake isn’t going to catch a lot because fish don’t want to stare up into the sun so they’re going to be in cover. They’re going to be hiding under things. They’re going to be down deeper. They’re not going to be out getting a suntan. Fish are a little bit light sensitive, they feel a little bit vulnerable in the bright light so spinner baits at that time when it’s flat, flat calm.

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But once you get a little bit of that afternoon wind picking up and that chop starts to break up that light penetration going through the water, you get those waves, those short choppy little waves, that makes a big difference in terms of how much light penetration there is and that can get the fish looking up again. And they’ll, that’s the perfect time to whack a spinner bait around.

So again, like I said, first cast is little short casts 360 degrees. I work my way all the way around, get a feel for what’s around me. Next I’ll cast it a little further and maybe I’ll let it go a little deeper. And so I’ll know how far it is before I’m near shore, trees, lily pads, weeds, whatever this thing’s going to bang off of. And I’m going to know what’s down below the surface, maybe two or three feet down. Is it deep, you know, am I tipping weed tips, you know if I’m knocking on the weed tips as I’m reeling it back two or three feet below the surface.

If I’m still not feeling anything, it’s just plain water, I’ll cast even as far as I can at that point and if I haven’t got any strikes, I’ll let the thing go even

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deeper. And then I’ll use it more, at that point it’s more becoming a search tool than it is an actual fishing lure. So now I’m using it to see how deep is the water? I’ll cast it out, I’ll wait and I’ll feel and I’ll wait and I’ll count and I’ll let it sink to the bottom. And then I’ll, “One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand,” That’s feet and so if you can get to ten thousand, you’ve got, you know, ten feet deep before it plunks on the bottom and it stops taking the line off and you feel that little bump because it hit the bottom.

You’ll feel that through the rod tip as you’re following it down sort of keeping the line, not too tight but sort of semi slack. You’ll feel it hit the bottom. And then once you’ve determined the depth of the water in front of you, beside you, behind you, you sort of get a feel. Is it dropping off quickly? Is it flat all around? Is there structure down there?

And then you start reeling it in and hopping it along the bottom. Reel, lift, let it drop, reel, lift, let it drop. Is it banging on rocks? Is it crawling over stumps and logs down there? Is it getting tangled up in little weeds? Do you have to pop it out of the

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weeds every so often? Is it weedy on the bottom? That will give you an idea what’s down there and what you might want to try next or where you might want to move to because often you realize that over in one direction there’s a weed line and you might want to follow that weed line along and fish that weed line where the fish will be hiding.

Behind you it might just be muddy bottom and you know there’s not going to be anything down there except maybe some catfish so you might want to just avoid that. But this, now the spinner bait is a real search tool. It’s your eyes underwater. It’s telling you what’s going on, what’s down there, and maybe even catching you a few fish at that point. So it’s a weedless searching instrument. It’s a probe, it’s an extension of your finger.

And if you think about it, really a fishing rod is just a really high price white stick that has a fishing reel strapped to one end and a bunch of guides strapped to its length and it’s just a probe. It’s not a spear, it’s not a club. A lot of guys like to use it like that and they don’t get the advantage of their high price fishing rod. It really, when you’re spending anywhere up to three, four five hundred

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dollars on a really quality fishing rod, you’re getting an instrument. It’s a highly tuned, highly refined instrument that is going to allow you to feel every little sensation.

It’s going to allow you to determine if the bottom of the water where you’re fishing…it’s underwater, is there mud down there, if it’s gravel, if it’s sand, if it’s rocky, if it’s stumpy, if it’s weedy, you’ll feel all that through your fishing rod.

Now you think about it, where else are people feeling so much? I mean this is a sport where grown men are feeling, you know? And they’re talking about their feelings. Mind you, they’re not that articulate about it, you know they just, a lot of them just say, “If it feels different, set the hook.”

But I try, that’s my seminars, my “Feel the Bite” seminars and the articles that I write, I try to introduce some language into the dialogue where people can start to talk a little bit more precisely about exactly what it is they’re feeling. You know, how is that bite different today and what is it exactly that you’re feeling so you can start to

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share that information with a little more refinement to make it a little more useful to the people you’re talking to.

Feeling the bite, that’s mostly…with fishing about nine times out of ten, you’re going to feel those fish before you see them and that goes for everybody. Now there’s some techniques where it’s very visually oriented. But there’s other techniques where it’s totally, totally feel the bite and that’s what we’re talking about today.

So we covered spinner baits as your first sort of search tool when you get out on the water. It’s your early morning tool. It’s the one that sort of gives you that confidence when you’re out in the boat with someone you haven’t fished with before or a friend or someone you just want to show that you can hold your own and catch some fish.

First thing in the morning you get out there, you start casting that around. You’re not going to embarrass yourself, you’re not going to get tangled, you’re not going to need someone to move the boat over there so you can get your lure

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out of the tree. You can just do it all yourself just by carefully pulling it over the branch without it wrapping, and you’re going to catch fish. So you’re going to show you’re going to catch fish. And that’s a great way to start the day with a couple fish in the live well that give you confidence, a good boost, you know? So how we doing for time Larry?

Larry MuffetWell we’re doing fine. This would be a good time to start taking some questions. One question, Heather wanted you to give your website again, give your web address again.

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Lawrence GuntherIf you Google “Blind Fishing Boat” you’ll find my website. But my website is blindfishingboat.com. That’ll get you right there and it’ll bring you to a website called lawrencegunther.com and then there’s two blog pages on that. There’s “Feel the Bite” and there’s “Blind Fishing Boat.” Now “Feel the Bite” is my tournament stuff and it’s my mainstream sort of fishing stuff, but people who are, you know, not interested really in blindness issues but interested in my fishing stuff visit that. That’s pure fishing stuff.

And then there’s also “Blind Fishing Boat,” the “Blind Fishing” blog is where I put stuff that’s more specific to blindness and people who are interested in sharing information around blindness and fishing related stuff. So there you’re going to hear more about electronics specific to the blind, navigational aids specific to the blind, techniques specific to the blind, and that sort of stuff so it’s easier to find. So that’s lawrencegunther.com or blindfishingboat.com either of those will get you to those pages.

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Larry MuffetLawrence for people that think that they’d like to start into this hobby and I’m sure you can spend as much as you want or as you can or as you have, but what would be a good figure for someone to spend to get this equipment that they need to get started at a basic level and what would that equipment be?

Lawrence GuntherWell I would start with a medium six foot spinning rod with a spinning reel, some 20 pounds braid fishing line, and a few spinner baits. That would be a great way to start. And some people say buy your last rod first. You know, don’t buy something too cheap in other words. If you’re going to buy a spinner bait rod, a good spinning rod that you’re going to use for spinner baits and you’re going to think, “Sure, I’m just going to try fishing…” But chances are you’re going to get hooked, you’re going to want to do it. And a decent spinning rod, you don’t want to get something that’s really flimsy whippy.

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You want to get something that’s fairly stout about two thirds to three quarters of the way up from the handle. And maybe that top third or top quarter of the rod has some nice flex to it and that’s your, that will help you with the casting, that will help with flinging the lures. But you want to have a little bit stiffer because remember the blind person, you’re going to be casting into all sorts of crazy stuff and you need a rod that’s just a little bit tougher to get it out.

Some of these lighter rods, softer rods, you know you’re going to get tangled up with those things and they’re just not going to have the horsepower to pull your lure back out and get it freed up again. So air towards the lightly tougher rods if you can. You know, the more you spend, the lighter they’re going to get but a good size reel is about a 2,500 size reel and something that can hold maybe 140 yards of 8 pound test monofilament with 25 test braid.

The difference is those are two types of fishing line. Monofilament is plastic but it stretches like crazy. It’s the cheapest fishing line you can buy but it just stretches like crazy so you have fifty feet of that

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out there and then it’ll stretch another five feet. So that means that any time you feel anything with that, it gets all muddied up. It gets blurry because of the stretch.

Braid is really, it’s a whole bunch of threads wrapped together into a braid, just like braiding your hair. It’s thinner than mono, it’s stronger, but it has zero stretch so when you feel something, you know it’s there. It’s right there. You’re getting full, maximum transmittal of the feeling sensation. So you want to spend a little bit more on your fishing line. Get some braid. Powerpro makes some good braids. There’s a bunch of good braid on the market. It’s all good stuff, really. Just get some green stuff. You don’t need the high visibility stuff because you can’t see anyways.

And yeah, and a medium or a medium heavy spinning rod, something graphite, you know. Try to stay away from fiberglass and there’s not much fiberglass on the market anymore anyways. But get something graphite and look at the warranty. A lot of the companies will warranty it if you break the tip off and you’ll have an exchange warranty. So if you spend a little bit more as you go with the

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right company, I go with Shimano and they have a great exchange policy. I break three rods a year, normally my fault all the time, and they replace them for me so I like Shimano for that.

Larry MuffetAlright Lawrence, I’m going to turn loose of the microphone here for just a second and we’ll see if we have some people from the audience who would like to ask a question. So if you have a question this would be a great time to jump in. So I’m going to turn loose of the microphone here and see what we’ve got in the audience. Other questions for Lawrence right now?

GaryHi Lawrence, this is Gary. I’m just kind of curious. I’m an avid fisherman and I fish almost on a daily basis and thank you for taking the time of instructing us here today. I was wondering, I tie my own hooks by using my tongue to run the line through. Do you do something like that also or how do you go about tying your jigs or your hooks or you know, whatever lure that you’re using?

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Lawrence GuntherOkay, yeah, that’s a great question, Gary, a very excellent question. And it’s something I can do automatically. Like you, I use the tip of my tongue and that’s really a, you know it’s a sensitive part of the body and it’s like a third finger, right? You’ve got your hand holding your lure and the other hand holding the tip of your fishing line to make sure there’s maybe a quarter inch of fishing line sticking up between your thumb and your forefinger. And just by using the tip of your tongue without getting it all wet and slobbery, you can just feel, put the eye of the hook against the tip of your tongue and you can just feel that tip of your fishing line lining up with the eye of the hook and it will slide right through. Then normally I’ll slide right through and I’ll grab it with my teeth and hold on to it, get everything in position, get my hands repositioned to tie the knot. It’s a great way to do it. Now when you’re threading braid, thin braid, there’s two ways of doing it. Braid isn’t like pushing string, it’s like pushing rope so it can be a little frustrating that way. So if it’s dry I’ll double it over, pinch it sort of with my fingers to make it a little thicker and pointy at the end and then I’ll generally get that through the eye of the hook. But another way to do this and it works really well is little crochet hooks.

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You get them at, you know, the stores, any sort of stores they sell these things like Wal-Mart or whatever. And you get the size one, 0.1 size, the tiny size and it’s just a tiny little hook about five inches long, four inches long and you can use that. Poke that right through the eye of your hook, grab your fishing line with it, pull it through and it pulls it through doubled up and then you can sort of just pull the tag end through and make your knot that way. And I use those little hooks all the time for trickier little bits when I’m threading and so on and very useful to have some around, for sure. There’s also needle threaders where are just a really thin bent over piece of wire attached to some stamp sized piece of aluminum and you can put that through really tiny hooks and then slide your line through the metal hook and slide that back through. So yeah, getting fishing line through hooks and lines like when I’m running my line up through my guides on my fishing rod, I use my tongue all the time. Push with one hand, grab it with the other and line it up with my tongue all the way up the rod. And learning to tie some knots, you know everyone who fishes can tie a knot in the dark. It just comes automatically in time so you don’t need to see to tie knots. Everyone who fishes can tie knots with their eyes closed. So on my

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website there’s some descriptions on how to tie some of the basic knots and when to use them. So feel free to visit that. The improved clinch knot is a good all-around knot. The Palomar Knot is also an excellent knot as well.Larry MuffetLawrence…

Lawrence GuntherCan I just get a…

Larry MuffetGo ahead.

Lawrence GuntherYou want me to move on with my next fishing technique?

Larry MuffetI have one more question for you here. Josh wants to know, how do you know which fist to grab by the mouth and which ones you grab by the gills? He’s

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already caught one and he says, “The reason I ask is I know some have teeth and others have sharp gills.” So how does that work exactly?

Lawrence GuntherWell you know what, it’s a good question too and with experience you’ll know what kind of fish you have on the line just by the way it’s behaving. Before you even see it, you’ll know and a lot of guys who fish, they know what they caught before they see it just by the waves, by the way it’s reacting, by the way it’s swimming. But what I do is I get the fish up beside the boat. It’s a little bit tired out, I don’t lift its head out of the water, I just sort of get the line tight. It’s lying there beside the boat. I’ll then get on my knees, lean the rod against the side of the boat. I’ll run my hand down the line, from the tip of the rod to the water.

And the first thing that I’m going to come in contact with is the lure, right? Because it’s, 99.9% it’s sticking out of the fish’s mouth. And if you hold your hand sort of in a fist as you’re sliding it down, even if the line is, your hook’s swallowed right down by the fish’s mouth, you’re not going to stick

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your finger right in their mouth. You’re going to come right up to the side of their face with your closed fist, you know, as you’re sliding your hand down the line. So it’s not going to go into the fishes mouth unless you’ve got something really big on and you’ve got something that big on, I hope you’re not fishing by yourself. You know? Because you’re probably going to need a hand.

But for sure now I know where the head is, so then I clamp down on the line, not holding the head. I just clamp down on the line by the lure. I hold the lure or just the line right up close to the face so now I know where the head is. The head is a little bit immobilized. Then with my other had I’ll go around to the tail end and I’ll run it up from the tail under the belly until I got my hand just about mid belly and then I’ll grab it just behind the sort of gills there, mid belly.

Take a nice firm hold of the belly and lift it out of the water that way as I’m holding the lure or line right there by the face. So you know it feels that tension right there by the face. It’s not going to start flopping around. Most fish will behave themselves at that point and they don’t want to

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give up their meal. A lot of them still think they’ve got something good to eat inside their mouth and they’re thinking you’re going to try to take it away from them.

So you want to get them up on the water and get them in a comfortable spot, you know, hugged to your chest kind of thing or in your arm like a baby and then you can sort of pry their mouth open. And bass have no teeth so you can just slide your finger down the line and put your finger tip right onto the bend of the hook and just push and push the hook out that way. You won’t get the hook in your finger because you’re just pushing on the bend of the hook, not on the point of the hook. But fish with teeth, pliers you want to keep they needle nose pliers around for that one. Should we keep going then with technique number two?

Larry MuffetYeah, definitely. Let’s hear more.

Lawrence Gunther

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Alright. So the next, this is the most amazing method of fishing for bass or for a lot of types of fish that has really caught on in the tournament circuit. It’s called drop shotting. Drop shotting again, you’re going to do with a spinning rod more often than not, just like with the spinner bait, with the spinner bait you can do the spinning rod for sure. But a drop shot, you want a rod with a slightly lighter tip, a flimsier tip because that tip is going to prevent the fish from feeling you. You don’t want the fish to feel that tension of the line. You want the fish, because it’s going to eat slowly.

The drop shot is slow, they’re curious, they’re mouthing the bait, their sucking on it, their tasting it, they’re licking it, they’re smelling it and they’re chewing on it all just to feel what the heck it is. And you’re just sort of every so often checking your line, lifting a bit. When you feel that tension that, that spongying heaviness, you know you got a fish there, right?

So a drop shot rig is basically a hook that’s tied on your line about a foot to two feet up from the end and that hook sort of sticks out sideways perpendicular from the line. And then you can

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either tie a sinker on that or a worm bait or a little plastic minnow bait or even a real minnow or a real worm. And then you put your weights, these special drop shot weights and they’re very handy. You can put split shot weights, but you don’t want to tie a weight onto the end of a line.

You put that right on the end of the line so the weight is at the end and the hook is up from the end. And then what you do is you drop that over the side of the boat, if you’re in a boat, or you cast it out from the dock a little ways and you let it go to the bottom. And you let the weight land on the bottom, and then you reel up a little bit of the slack so now your line isn’t straight as an arrow between the weight and the tip of your rod. So it’s got a little bit of a bow in it, it’s got a slackness.

For large mouth sometimes you want to jiggle it just a little bit. For small mouth you don’t even want to move it. Just let it sit there and naturally the waves and the currents will move it around a little bit. And some of these smaller drop shot plastic baits will just quiver down there and the bass just smash these things. It’s amazing. You

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want to fish this probably in at least six feet of water down to as much as thirty feet of water.

You don’t want to catch bass any deeper than thirty feet down because they don’t have the ability to burp up the gas in their swim bladder as they’re coming up to depressurize. There’s a lot of pressure thirty feet down and as you’re bringing them up bass and pike and walleye, they can’t regulate their pressure in their swim bladder that easily and that swim bladder will just expand, expand, expand and cause the fish all sorts of grief. So you know you want to keep it to about 25 feet down. If you’re going to go a little bit deeper you want to make sure you get that fish back down there real fast or maybe have someone around that knows how to fizz a fish but we won’t get into that.

But drop shotting is a totally tremendous, fantastic way of fishing. It’s almost straight up and down. Quite often straight up and down is always better. If you cast it out a little bit, that’s fine too, but it’s really a feel the bite technique.

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Another feel the bite technique is just jigging and jigging goes back in time thousands of years. And I think it even came from the word ‘jiggling.’ You just drop a lure down there straight below you and you jiggle it, right? You jiggle it, you lift it up and down, lift it up and down, lift it up and down. And you’re just banging it on the bottom or just near the bottom. And you put, it’s a jig head which is a hook with a piece of lead molded onto the hook near where you tie on and then you can put a minnow on there or a worm or some plastic, soft plastic.

And you’re just bumping that up and down, up and down and normally the fish sees that and they think it’s some sort of dying minnow or dying something because it’s trying to get up and it can’t get up and it falls back down. Tries to get up again, can’t get up, and it falls back down. So it thinks, “That’s an easy meal.” The fish is thinking, “That poor minnow, it’s dying. I’m going to go over and eat it because it can’t even swim away from me.”

So it’s going to come over and donk, you’re going to feel that donk, or you’re going to feel that chu-chonk when it bites it or a champ-champ or just

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maybe even a real heavy pressure. And normally they bite as you’re letting it drop bback down. So you’re lifting it up, it’s swimming away, it’s watching it swim away and then you stop lifting it up.

Maybe you’re lifting it anywhere from six inches at a time or a foot at a time, maybe a foot and half. No more than that and you just let it drop down again. And just as it’s dropping down, that’s when they bonk it. So what you want to do is when you’re dropping it back down, you don’t lift it up fast and just drop your rod and just let it free fall.

You want to follow it back down with your rod tip. So as it’s falling you don’t want to interfere with the naturalness of the fall, but you want to be close to it. You want to keep the line almost tight as it’s falling down but not tight so you’re just almost touching the lure, almost keeping contact with the lure as it’s falling back down but not really interfering with the free fall. And that’ll come in time. This comes with practice.

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It’s like a rhythm, it’s like playing a drum, beating a drum with your hand. It just becomes a rhythm. You lift, you drop, you lift, you drop. But as you’re lifting it’s a little bit faster, as you’re dropping it’s just a little bit faster than the lure’s dropping so you’re not interfering with its fall.

You can jig jigs, you can jig spoons, it looks like a spoon with a hook on the end of it. You can jig all sorts of things. But it’s a great way to fish deep, it’s a great way to fish walleye, it’s a great way to fish down straight below. The best way to jig is always straight below. Jigging through the ice is very common up here in the winter time in the northern states and Canada. We jig through the ice all the time and jigging is a fantastic technique and it’s really a feel the bite technique.

The fourth technique, you know everyone’s heard of soft plastics and [synchros]. Gary Yamamoto was out in a fishing tournament, he looked at his pen. It was just a pen with a clicker on it and he looked at it and thought, “Well that would be an interesting bait,” and he made one out of soft plastic. It looks pretty well the same shape as a pen. It thinner and pointier at one end and sort of a

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blunter end at the other and you can hook that two ways. You can hook that with a hook thread through the end or you can hook it right through the middle with a smaller hook and it depends if you want to fish it really weedless or fish it sort of just free sinking. And it’s a tremendous bait for bass. It’s fantastic bait. Everyone and their dog has emulated it and ripped off the pattern but they still call them [synchros]. The generic term is a stick bait and it’s a great way to fish in weedy cover. When you know in the middle of the day I talked to you about fish, it’s sunny and the fish have taken cover and their hiding under lily pads and around weeds and stumps and things like that? That’s when you want to get one of these stick baits out, you rig it weedless or semi-weedless. You start chucking it out and sometimes that technique is just to throw it out as far as you can and let it sink down, check it every so often, wait thirty seconds, forty-five seconds, if nothing’s bit, reel it in and do it again. And sometimes it takes thirty five, forty seconds for the fish. It’s just watching it, it’s watching it, it’s watching it and finally it just goes over and grabs it and starts to eat it. And then you pick up on the line, you feel that pressure there and boom, you set the hook and you’re good to go. So that’s a great little technique.

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Now there’s one more technique I’m going to finish with, but before we do that, let’s, any more questions?Larry MuffetLet’s see if we have some more questions in the audience.

GaryLawrence, Gary here. You’d mentioned northern states and Canada. My mic went dead here for part of the time so I had to regroup and put a different mic on. So where are you from? That may have been mentioned in the beginning.

Lawrence GuntherOkay, I’m from Ottawa, Canada. Ottawa is Canada’s national capitol in the providence of Ontario, right on the border of the providence of Quebec which is our French speaking providence. We have the Ottawa river here which is about thirteen hundred miles long river and there’s about five other rivers that flow into this river right around where I live. And then we have a whole

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bunch of lakes and things so I tell ya, I can catch fish right in the middle of my city and we have some of the best Musky fish. It’s just fantastic fishing around here. It really is, we’re very lucky. I mean there’s good fishing everywhere, you just have to look around and ask questions.

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Larry MuffetI’m going to see if there’s another question out there. Hang on just a second. Another question for Lawrence?

DannyYes, Danny from Toronto. Hi Lawrence, Danny. Just want to ask you the last technique you mentioned, do we need to use…Do you use any weight on the bait. That’s question number one, but when you wait thirty to forty-five seconds and reel it back in, do you reel it back in then cast again or you reel and stop and then reel and stop?

Lawrence GuntherHey Danny, good to hear your voice, buddy. Those are excellent questions and I’ll answer them in order. The weight question, it depends on how active the fish are. If I think they’re really slow and sluggish and I’m fishing in slightly shallower water, I will use no weight.

I’ll cast it on a rod with a lighter tip and I’ll let it just sink down real slow because with no weight it’s

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going to sink down, like it’s going to take the count of “one thousand, two thousand, three thousand,” just to sink one foot. And just coming down that slow, it just drives fish nuts. They can’t stand it. They don’t want to eat. They don’t feel like eating, but this thing is coming down and they’re watching it and they’re going, “I can’t stand it anymore!” They just have to go over and chomp on it. So sometimes, you know, for neutral fish or fish that are feeling a little off, having a weightless, slower down presentation is the way to go.

I’ll put on a weight when I’m fishing a little bit deeper. Say I’m fishing that same sort of plastic lure and I want to get it down to six, seven feet down fast or ten feet down fast, I’ll put on a weight accordingly. If I’m fishing weedless and I have to go through a little bit of weed cover to get to where I want to get to, then I’ll add a little more weight. So it all depends on what you need to do and how much cover you need to penetrate. You know, if you want to get it through the lily pads and get it below the lily pads sometimes you have use as much as an ounce of weight to punch through those lily pads. You know we can’t pick the holes, we can’t cast into the gaps so sometimes we

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need to use a little more weight because when we chuck it out there, it’s really a crap shoot as to where it’s going to land. If it lands on the pads, you want it to punch right through, you know. You don’t want it just sitting there on top of the weeds doing nothing. You want it to punch right through.

Now your question about reeling it back in, if I’m fishing a Texas Rig which is a longer hook and the hook tip is sort of buried into the middle of the lure and the head of the plastic lure is connected to sort of the eye of the hook so it’s in a straight line parallel with my fishing line, I might twitch it back to the boat. You know I’ll throw it out there, reel, stop, reel stop, so almost like I’m jigging.

I lift it up with my rod maybe a foot or two and then I reel down and pick up the slack as I’m reeled down, the lure’s dropping and I’m following it back down with my rod tip, not interfering with the natural drop, just close, close falling so I can pick up on those hits. And I’ll do that.

You know, think about it. If you look at the angle, your line is out there, it’s angled almost horizontal

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so when you pull the line towards you while lifting up your rod tip, the lure is traveling towards you about twice as much distance as it is lifting. So then it’s only going to fall maybe a foot. It’s going to come towards you maybe two or three feet, but it’s only going to fall maybe a foot to get back down to the bottom.

So you’ve got to, you know, follow it down pretty quick and then reel up that little extra bit of slack and do it again, but it’s only in that first foot or so that it’s going to get that hit just as you stop and just as it starts to drop, that’s when you’re going to get that hit again. So that’s where you want to pay the most attention as you’re pulling it and then you’re letting it drop.

But I was fishing in a tournament on Sunday. I was rigging them wacky and wacky is where you bend the [synchro] in half, you put the hook right through the middle, a little round hook more or less, put it right through the middle of the bait and it’s perpendicular to the line. It’s like a “T” and you throw that out and it just falls and quivers on its way down and ends up in the bottom, usually mixed up in some weeds down there.

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So I pull it out, I now probably got weeds on the end of the hook. I can feel the extra weight, I just reel it in, peel the weeds off, clean it off, chuck it out again. Every time I know I’m going to get back with weeds. If I haven’t got it back with weeds, I probably wasn’t fishing in the right area. If you’re not catching weeds, you’re not getting hooked on stumps, stuck on logs and rocks, you’re not fishing in the right territories, my friend.

You got to go where the fish are and the fish are in the cover. Eighty percent of the water out there is baron, it’s empty, there’s nothing there. It’s just water and that’s all. The fish are in that 20% of the water where the cover is, where the trees are, where the rocks are, anywhere where there’s transition where it goes from shallow to deep, where there’s a hump of rocks, where there’s a pile, where there’s points of land sticking out, where there’s weed lines and edges and bays and things of that nature. Any transitional areas, anything that looks different.

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The main part of the lake, the middle part of the lake, you know it could just be flat, flat, flat, flat down there, there’s nothing out there. You know, not all cases of fish, but more often than not, 99% of the case you’ve got to find the fish and you’re going to find them near where the structure is, and that’s where you’re going to get stuck so you have to plan on losing a few hooks and getting stuck a few times. Most times you can get it out, you just have to work on it a little bit. Change you angle. If you get stuck pulling it this way, move the boat around the other way and it’ll come out guaranteed.

Last technique I want to talk about and then we’ll just get into a few more questions, I’ll talk to you a little bit about a technology too. The last technique is frog fishing. Not with real frogs, these are artificial frogs like Snag Proof makes some artificial frogs. It’s like a soft hollow body made out of rubber. It’s got a double hook that goes right through the body and these things are meant to float.

They float on top of the water and you throw them out onto the lily pads, out onto grass, out into the

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thickest, heaviest junk you can possibly imagine. And then you reel it and you tug it and you haul it back in. It’s bouncing, it’s jerking, it’s bobbling, it’s crashing into things as it’s coming through all this heavy cover. It’s bouncing over the lily pads and bass just go nuts over these. Now you don’t want to go too fast, a slower retrieve is better. A little few pauses here and there but the bass just explode underneath these things.

Now this is where most people make the mistake. They hear the explosion or sighted people see the fish coming up out of the water and first thing they do is set the hook. Think about it, you guys. The fish is pointed straight up in the air with his mouth wide open thinking he’s going to swallow a frog. It doesn’t know that that frog is tied to a piece of really heavy fishing line and connected to a big heavy fishing rod, connected to big guy that’s popping it away from him at 110 miles an hour, right?

So it’s not clamping down. It thinks, “I’ve got this frog in my mouth, it’s got nowhere to go. I’m just hanging on to it until I can get my head back underwater and then I’m going to swallow it.” But

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until that fish gets its head back underwater, it’s not thinking about swallowing, it’s just thinking about hanging on to that frog that it just caught and just long enough to get back underwater and do a proper job of eating it. So you’ve got to wait.

You’ve got to wait and the best way I can tell you how to wait is when you’re retrieving these frogs you’ve got to keep your rod tip almost at 12 o’clock, almost straight up, that way you’ve got no chance of setting hook because you can’t pull it back any further. You’ve got it pulled back all the way already, right? The rod is straight up in the air. What are you going to do? Pull it back way over your shoulder? No that’s not going to happen. So you hear the big splash. It’s like a toilet flushing. I mean it’s like “Kaboosh.”

You hear that splash, what do you do? You drop your rod tip down, you reel in the slack and by the time you’ve got that slack reeled in and that rod tip is down, and you don’t have to go nuts on it, it’s going to happen, that fish has had a chance to turn its head back down and just start to swim back down under the cover.

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And that’s when your line tightens up and that’s when you set the hook, get that rod tip back up to the eleven or twelve o’clock position, and get that fish’s head turned around again so now the fish is pointed back up again and you’re lifting him back out on top of those lily pads, back up on top of that weed. And then you’re basically just trying to skim him across the surface back towards you where there’s open water and then you can let him get his head down a little bit and work off a bit of energy and get that fight out of him before you bring him up to the boat.

But you don’t want to let him have that fight out there in all the weeds because what is he going to do? He’s going to get down there, he’s going to wrap your line around three or four weeds until it’s all tied up and then he’s going to use that to pull the hook out of his mouth, swim away and all you’re going to end up with is twenty pounds of weed.

Frog fishing is super exciting, super exciting to do at night, and we’ve got an advantage over sighted

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people because they always want to see their frog. They always want to keep it in eyesight. We can cast it way out as far as we can. We don’t need to see it because you’re listening, right? You’re listening and you’re hearing for the big splash and you can do it in the middle of the night. Frog fishing is a real blast.

Larry if we’ve got a few minutes I’ll just talk a little bit about some of the technology I’ve been using lately that are blindness related, is that okay?

Larry MuffetThat sounds great.

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Lawrence GuntherAlright, well I’ve been using the Trekker Breeze. It’s a GPS system made by Humanware. And that allows me to create my wave points on the water so I can save my spots and I can get back to them. With that system I can get out my little Hobi Cat kayak and I’ll make my first wave point there near the beach where I’m leaving. And then I’ll get out there and I’ll start exploring.

With a kayak you can go anywhere. You know, you can run it up on shore, but you know you can hear where the shore is. You can hear the wind in the trees. You can hear the birds in the trees, you can hear the people on the beaches so you always sort of know where you are. Sometimes you’ll get a little too close to shore but it really doesn’t matter with a kayak, there’s no motor anyways, right?

So you find yourself those spots, you make a wave point and then you can get back with the Breeze. You don’t need a street map, it will navigate you back to where you need to get to, where you came from, as long as you’re always heading towards a wave point that you’ve created yourself. It will tell

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you how far it is away and it will tell you what direction you need to go in.

I don’t recommend this for speed boats or anything, boats with a gasoline motor, you can’t hear and boats have no breaks so you don’t want to be driving around in a boat that doesn’t have breaks and run into someone in a canoe or some swimmer or some dock, some private property and cause damage or personal injury and get your ass sued off. And you will get your ass sued off so you’ve got to be careful about that.

But kayaks are pretty harmless things, they’re all made out of plastic so even if you run into someone’s $75,000 fiberglass boat, you’re just going to bounce off it. You’re not going to cause any injury or harm to a boat. And a swimmer’s going to see you coming and you’ll hear the swimmer as well. So you’re pretty safe in a kayak.

I always use the little [portaboat], the little folding plastic boat weighs about 70 pounds. I have an electric motor on that and I have some censors that I put on the front of that boat that beep if

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there’s something in front of that boat. It does about three or four miles an hour but that allows me to get the kids out or go out fishing with you know, another person. But it’s a very portable boat, you can fold it up flat. It’s about four inches thick. It’s a great way to go as well.

There’s a compass being made, a beeping compass being made in the UK called “Max Pack” and that’s a great way to paddle in a straight line. With GPS you might paddle and it might be a little more zigzag. You’ll be losing some, you won’t be making ground that quick. But this compass helps you go in a much straighter line. It’s a great little system as well.

Swell paper, I don’t know if you guys remember swell paper, that’s that tactile paper. You draw on it with a pencil run it through the heat thing and then the lines pop up. That paper, it makes water proof maps so if you’ve got someone that can, if you can get your hands on some of the swell paper and you know someone who’s got a printer, get them to go on Google Earth, find a map of the place you’re going to fish and get them to trace it out for you and print it off for you. Now you’ve got

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a map so you know exactly what’s around you. So you know the shoreline, you know the basic structure of the lake, and the basic features, you know? Put the dock on there where you’re starting and then you got an idea of the body of water that you’re on.

Another way to understand really the body of water that you’re on is that once you’re out there and speed boat goes by or a fishing boat, something that kicks up a wake. You know you’ve always got those two waves coming off each side of the back of the boat. You just listen for those waves rolling up on the shore and you’ll hear them. On a calm day you’ll hear those waves rolling up on the shore and that’ll paint you a picture of that body of water that you’re on just by listening. How much time does it take for those waves to find the shore in relation to where the boat was and where you are? And how far away does it sound? And you’ll get almost like a perfect mental image of the shoreline of that whole body of water within a mile of yourself on a calm day. You can hear that for quite a ways away, that wake running up on the shore.

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So those are some of the techniques I use for navigating on water on my own. And you know it’s a little tricky. You will spin in circles but the thing with GPS is keep some speed up. If you’re not going at least as fast as you’re walking, you’re not going to get the right messages and it’s going to start spinning you in circles. So slowing down with GPS doesn’t help, you’ve got to keep the speed up a little bit as you’re paddling. I like the Hobi Cat kayaks because they have a little foot petal system in them now. That means my freed up for fishing, I have one hand, I can use the rutter, a little hand controlled rutter system and the other hand, I can hold my fishing rod and I’m pedaling these pedals that are fasten after the flippers of a penguin and they pop down below they kayak. It’s very efficient. You can go for miles just by pedaling these things. It’s not like a paddleboat at all. These are super fast, super efficient ways of moving around on a fishing kayak. All the guys that are in fishing are getting into these Hobie Kayak kayaks with the mirage logged pedal systems. It’s a fantastic way to go for sure.

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Boy I could talk forever, but Larry I’m sure maybe there’s some questions. I think we’re running out of time, too.

Larry MuffetHeather asked you to repeat the names of those GPS and compass products that you just mentioned

Lawrence GuntherYeah, the GPS is the Breeze from Humanware. That’s BREEZE and it’s an all in one hand held unit with a microphone, speaker, and GPS antennae all built into the size of a gee, what is that size? It looks like a walkie talkie size kind of thing. And the compass is called a Max Pac, MAX PAC and that’s made in the UK by a guy and his son on their kitchen table. So you contact them through the website and they’ll make you one, mainly for blind sailing. They get a lot of orders from blind sailors, but as well for blind fishing as well, they’re great little systems. It’s just you press the button, it comes on and it sort of locks on to a coordinate and beeps. It gives you different beep tones depending on how far off course you are.

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Larry MuffetI think we’ve got time for one more question so I’m going to turn loose of the microphone here. If you have a question for Lawrence I assume you want to get in here right away and ask it so I’m going to turn loose of the microphone, let’s see what we have.

AudienceJust a quickie question Lawrence, the Hobi Kayak, it’s the first I’ve ever heard of that and it sounds really interesting. What do they typically run and do you have to be concerned with them tipping over like if a boat goes by, a speed boat with skiers or something?

Lawrence GuntherYeah, those Hobi Kayaks range in price anywhere from you know, seven, eight hundred dollars all the way to twenty eight hundred dollars depending on what you’re looking for. They’re generally sit on top kayaks, so they’re not the kind of kayak that

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has a hole that you pop your legs through and you have a skirt that goes around your waist to keep all the water out. These are like fair weather kayaks, they’re for warm days, warmer water.

You’re sitting on top of the kayak. They’re normally about thirty inches in width around the seat area so they’re very stable. You can stand up in these kayaks and fish. If you’re going to stand up in a kayak though and you’re blind, you probably want to have some sort of bungee cord connecting you to the kayak in case you fall in. Because once you’re out of the boat you really don’t have any way of finding out where the boat went, it doesn’t come back and get you and it doesn’t talk.

So you’ve got to keep yourself connected to the boat and if you don’t have it tethered…I tether everything…my landing net, my paddle, my fishing rod. I have everything tethered with little bungee cords and clips and things like that. Because if it isn’t tethered I can be pretty sure I’m going to lose it at the bottom of the lake. But Habi Cat, they have the Pro Anger 12, they came out with last year, one of the best kayak fishing boats, the best fishing boat of the year at iCast which is the North

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American Fishing Tackle Expose and it’s a beautiful fishing machine. Mind you it’s $28,000, but by God I’d love to have one of those.

I use just a regular Hobi Cat Revolution. It’s 13 feet, it’s a little narrower. It goes faster, it’s a little bit tippier. I don’t mind it, I’m pretty secure on the water out there. I don’t feel worried about tipping. You’re sitting almost, your but is at water level so it really, there’s not a lot of rocking going on. You’re so close to the water it’s not like a canoe at all. You’re very, very stable. Larry MuffetIt looks like Dave has a question, Dave? Well Dave apparently doesn’t have a question. I’ve got one last question from Ron. What’s your opinion of Berkley Power Baits? That is to say plastic worms, lizards, etc..

Lawrence GuntherYeah, well you know Berkley is a huge company. That’s pure fishing. They make Shakespeare, Penn’s, Gulp, [Abnomatic], Gulp, tons and tons. It’s probably one of the biggest fishing companies in the world. They make Power Baits which have

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scents in them. They’re dry and they come in plastic packets, zip lock packet, which are very handy to throw brail on those packets when you get them, you know sit down with a sighted person, get your brail gun out or you could even just brail right through the packet. It’ll keep the brail right on there so you can with your slate and stylus just punch right through the wrapper just above the zip lock so you don’t penetrate the container itself and you can brail your packages. They’re really nice little packages that it comes in.

Berkley also makes stuff called Gulp Alive and Gulp alive is an organic plastic. It’s an organic material, feels like soft plastic but it comes in a juice and you have to keep it in that juice, otherwise it decomposes because it’s made out of a natural byproduct and it’s got a really good scent to it. It’s got some really good colors, some really good shapes, it’s a little messy to use, but boy it works well. It works really, really well. I always have some Gulp Alive baits with me.

As far as the plastics go, you know, there’s nothing wrong with the Berkley baits as well. Gary

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Yakomoto makes some good baits as well. There’s a bunch of good companies out there for sure.

Larry MuffetThis is fascinating and I wish we had more time to continue on with this but I’m afraid we’re reaching the end. And I want to let people know that this seminar like all of our seminars will be archived on our website and available for your use anytime around the clock. Also, each Hadley seminar is not made available as a podcast which you can download to your computer or mobile device. If today’s seminar has you interested in hearing more, please check out the Hadley website and the seminar archives.

Lawrence and I thank you for your participation. Your questions were outstanding and really added to the value of the seminar. Hadley values your feedback. Please let us know what you thought about today’s seminar and please give us suggestions for future topics. One way you can do this is by dropping us an email to feedback@hadley.edu. That’s feedback@hadley.edu.

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I want to hand the microphone back over to Lawrence for some closing remarks and what I’d like, Lawrence I’d like you for people that are sort of considering, their sort of vacillating back and forth whether they want to try fishing, could you give them a little pep talk and tell them really why they should make that decision and give fishing a try?

Lawrence GuntherYeah, I’d love to Larry. I’ve been at it all my life and am a member of a lot of fishing clubs now and the conservation director in a few fishing clubs, I’m on the executive of some fishing clubs. You got to get there, you got to take steps to get there. You can’t expect just because you’re blind that you’re going to get a free pass into someone’s boat guaranteed you know because you’re going to play the pity card.

You want to fish, you want to be a member of a fishing club, you want to, you know, have people ask you to go fishing, you have to remember two things. One is a lot of guys have boats and a lot

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people own boats and they’re looking for a partner to fill that empty seat to go fishing with, right? So you know, get familiar with boat terminology, get familiar with how to carry yourself on a boat, get on and off the boat, how to be on a dock. Get comfortable with all that, you know? Get yourself a life jacket.

Get comfortable with being around boats and understanding boat technology and terminology. Read up on boats. Read up so you know about boat so you can talk with some, you know, a little bit of intelligence about boats. Boats are a big part of fishing. The next thing you want to do is you want to learn the basics about fishing. You want to be able to tie your own lures, you want to be able to unhook your own fish and you want to be able to figure out how to catch fish.

The best thing is just practice, practice, practice your knots, practice your casting in the back yard or anywhere you can get casting. Just tie something on the end of your line and just practice casting. And, you know, you’re on a boat and you’re listening to someone cast, they don’t need to tell you where to cast, you just listen to where

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they’re casting and then you go out the same distance in the same general direction. You don’t want to cast where they just cast because you’re going to tangle lines, you’re going to catch the fish they’re trying to catch.

But you know, if they fishing out one side of the boat, you fish out the same side of the boat. Cast just as far as they are. You can tell just by ears, listening. You don’t need to bug them about where you’re going to catch fish. When people ask someone to go fishing with them in the boat, they generally want to find someone they can beat. No one wants to beat anyone in fishing to make them look really badly because that’s worse.

You know, if you’re fishing with someone and you’re catching ten fish and they haven’t caught a fish yet, that ruins your day. I mean the guy that’s catching no fish, their day is ruined, but you just, you’re making them feel worse by catching all the fish. You feel bad, right? So you don’t want to be the source of embarrassment or discomfort to the person you’re fishing with so you want to be able to hold your own.

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So if you don’t know much about fishing, go fishing with other people who don’t know much about fishing and learn together. Figure it out and as you get better, those are the kind of people you can go fishing with. You know, you’re not going to get a seat in the pro’s boat because these guys, they book like I do now, they book every weekend of their fishing season, is booked months in advance. They know who they’re fishing with, they know where they’re fishing.

And trying to get an open seat in their boat is pretty impossible unless you know them well and you’re on their cancelation list so if something happens they have all the sudden an open window, they’re going to call you. Trying to get on those lists are pretty tricky. You’ve got to be fishing on their level. If you want to ask someone to go fishing with them, to take you fishing, you sort of have to be at their level or just a little bit less than what they’re at.

You don’t want to be beating them all the time but you don’t want to be getting your ass handed to

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you on a platter, either though right? So get out, get practicing. Learn how to be independent, really tying knots, figuring out how to get familiar with your lures, what lures to use. All that information is on the internet.

Hang out at your tackle shop, get to know people, look at your fishing clubs. Some of the fishing clubs are very competitive. You might have a tougher time getting in on those right a way, you know, if you’re unknown. But if you want to get your name known, go into more of the recreation fishing clubs where it’s not so competitive and you’ll have a better chance of getting invited onto a boat that way because it’s not, there’s not big prizes at stake. There’s no big prize money at stake. But that’s the way to build up your experience and build up your knowledge and build up your reputation as someone who really can hold their own out there on the water and take care of their own business.

Because when you’re out there on the water and you’re fishing with a sighted person, really the blindness is not an issue anymore. It very seldom comes up, you can spend your whole day, you’ll

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never talk about it. It’ll never be an issue and you’ll be catching fish right alongside your buddy there, fish for fish. Or maybe you’ll out do them a few times in one part of the day and they’ll out do you another time of the day. But at the end of the day you’re both going to feel happy with how the day went. So good luck, practice, learn. Everything comes to those who put in the time to make the effort. I hope that’s helpful.

Larry MuffetThat’s fantastic, Lawrence, I really appreciate it. I want to personally thank all of you who signed in today for taking the time to be part of the seminar. Your questions and comments made it a lot of fun for both Lawrence and I.

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