Perhaps the fastest way to develop more confidence in your fish-catching ability is to be more observant. Watch what others are doing to become more successful. Store every little tidbit, trick or technique in the back of your head, and evaluate the current situation at hand to see if any of those stored ideas apply. The more you learn to pick the right ones at the right moment, the more confidence you’ll acquire.
Success builds success
While not a shortcut, I’ve found that putting in more days on the water in a short period of time can help to build your success and confidence faster. If you fish once every month or two, it’s harder to do. If you’re able to get out once a week or even more often, it’s likely your success rate and confidence level will improve exponentially. You start to recognize “conditions” that trigger the right response because you’ve seen it recently. Patterns develop in your mind and before you know it, much like a basketball player sees the hoop get bigger when he’s on fire, you know what to do next and you’re “in the zone.”
A couple years ago, I was fishing with Captain Confidence on a particular party boat that focused on yellowtail at Catalina Island. There was a pattern that the skipper certainly knew but it took me a bit to recognize. While the yellows were around the boat all morning, they wouldn’t bite. It was an afternoon thing, for a variety of reasons. I fished hard when lunchtime approached, knowing that the bite was coming. Some days it took going down to 15- pound fluorocarbon to get bit, but I knew I was going to get bit. I was fortunate to land one or more yellows on probably half a dozen trips in a row when there weren’t many being caught. I became very confident in assessing the situation, my skill-sets improved and success led to more success.
Do your homework
If you’re just not able to get out on the water as often as you’d like, but still want to feel confident when you are out there, do your homework. I’ll bet when you were in school you hated homework. But there probably weren’t many assignments focused on fishing. With all the information available on the internet, now there are thousands of resources for developing your skills, which in turn develop your confidence. Pick a topic, Google it or look on YouTube, and you’ll likely find a ton of information about it. And of course, if you found it on the internet and the author is a fisherman, it has to all be true, right? It’s a mental game too
Let’s face it. There are LOTS of really good fishermen out there. And fisherwomen. They have great tackle and many spend a small fortune on it. “Aw, the kids don’t really need to go to college, do they?” They spend hours perfecting their physical skills — casting accuracy, distance, plus working out, eating smart and developing stamina. But
often much of their success is driven by the mental side of the game. Nowhere is this more evident than professional bass fishing tournaments. Even if your pre-tournament fishing put you on the fish and determined what they were biting, it all goes out the window when the tournament actually starts. The pro’s pros know it boils down to having the right mindset and the confidence to know when to change directions or stick to your game plan.
The same holds true in any competitive sport. Every golfer on the pro circuit knows how to smack the heck out of the ball off the tee, get out of a sand trap, read a green and drop a 20-foot downhill putt. So why is it that we see the names of a relative few consistently at the top of the leaderboards? You guessed it… confidence.
So to catch more fish, try to be more observant, file away the tips that have produced in the past and develop the skill sets that you know will produce in the future. In short, develop your confidence game. And if that doesn’t work, you can always take up golf.
