THE SELF FULFILLING PROPHESY - Matt McQueen

Something often overlooked is recording what lures and methods did not work and how long you attempted to catch fish with these items. This is how my teammates finally convinced me that meat rigs weren’t producing as well as I thought.

 

It’s a game of odds. The less you run a lure behind your boat, odds are, it won’t catch many fish. 

 

How do you select what lures to use, locations to search, and lure delivery systems to utilize to catch fish? Over the years I’ve heard many different ideas on this subject. Some folks say, “Go with what you know.” or “You can’t fish someone else’s spread.” I’ve had people tell me they can smell the fish when they’re in the right area. If you were to ask any of the top tournament fishing pros, regardless of species, what are the most important characteristics of elite anglers, confidence would be one of the answers. Kevin VanDam, all-time money winner in professional bass fishing from Otsego, Michigan is a proponent of confidence in fishing. In his book, Kevin VanDam’s Bass Strategies, he claims, “Fishing is a trial-and-error process that requires patience, good observations and above all, confidence.”

Confidence is important, but it can also be a paralyzing trap in your decision process. Did you catch all your fish on your favorite Spicy Cheetah Fart spoon because it’s really that good, or is it because you fished that spoon more than anything else? You are naturally going to fish what you have confidence in more than what you don’t, and you can’t catch fish on lures that aren’t in the water. This becomes what Jim Thompson, Team Copperhead crewmember, calls “The Self-Fulfilling Prophesy of lure selection and performance.”

   

   

   

     

According to Jim, “People always start fishing with their favorite setup at the optimum depth, they always have it out and only change it when nothing is biting on anything. Consequently, it catches the most fish, which verifies (to the angler) it’s the best setup. You always use it, so it always catches fish…so you always use it. This becomes a “self-fulfilling prophesy.” People never give other setups the same chance (fishing time) as their favorite. For example, in the morning we always put on a Bechhold slick with a fly at the optimum depth. It’s the first one out and, low and be-hold, we catch the most fish on it—is it really that setup or the time and location we put it at? Another example is meat rigs, we drag them a lot and pick up a couple fish but they are in the water a lot. How about the Cleo, who would have ever thought that would have worked and now we put it out a fair amount.”

At the dock, someone tells you they caught all their fish on a UV Yooper Scooper SS Spoon. Next trip you run a Yooper Scooper and it doesn’t produce anything right away, so after five minutes you trade it out for your favorite Spicy Cheetah Fart spoon, which you drown for the rest of the trip and manage to catch a fish on it. You run your confidence lures longer and watch for strikes on them closer. Maybe your friend at the dock treats his Yooper Scooper the way you treat your Spicy Cheetah Fart and you’re both victims of the self-fulfilling prophesy.

 

“Dock talk” advice only goes so far. You must get on the water and create your own confidence lineup of lures and tactics.

 

In the spring we catch fish in the shallows, like most people. Is that the only place fish will be? Well, if you spend the primary part of your fishing trip in the shallows and make one Hail Mary out deep just before it’s time to come home, can you really say the fish aren’t out deep? You caught fish in the shallows because that’s where your confidence took you and that’s where you spent the majority of your effort.

 

How To Avoid— Lure Selection Stagnation

I love meat rigs. If you put a thick slab of bacon in a meat rig and slowly reeled it within my span of vision, chances are I’m going to grab it. My teammates aren’t big fans of meat rigs, and they aren’t fans of my hyper-selection of them. Maybe I had a good season with meat rigs sometime in the past and subconsciously I gravitate toward them. It’s a fact that meat rigs catch fish, but have you truly compared them with other lures without imparting your own personal bias?

  

  

   

   

Keeping a journal is the simplest way to recognize your biased selection of lures, locations, and methods. Many anglers already keep a journal that typically includes information like weather, location, fish caught, what fish were caught on, etc. Something often overlooked is recording what lures and methods did not work and how long you attempted to catch fish with these items. This is how my teammates finally convinced me that meat rigs weren’t producing as well as I thought. When you document your entire trolling spread for the day and record how long each lure gets a chance to produce, then you can truly compare them and reveal your own personal bias towards certain lures.

 

 In your journal, keep track of lures that you’ve tried that didn’t produce. Keep track of how much time you spent fishing these lures. Compare this to how much time your “confidence” lures got wet.

 

In fact, we did catch fish on meat rigs, but I ran them for far longer time than other lures. We were able to look back over the days on the water to see that some days we ran meat all day and only produced a single fish. Some days we ran multiple meat rigs, but they didn’t all produce. But one of them did, so in my mind the meat was working. Now, all of this doesn’t mean that meat rigs don’t catch fish. They obviously do. I’ve heard of some boats running exclusively meat rigs on all nine rods for tournaments out of our home port in Manistee, and walking away with the win.

I, in turn, have used this method to show teammates their own personal bias toward certain lures and colors. One of our teammates thought “Burnt Bread” was a hot color on a Moonshine spoon, but looking back over the seasons it wasn’t that hot (for us). Yes, “Burnt Bread” did catch some fish, but it wasn’t a top producing bait. He was able to rebut and claim that the data was inconclusive and that I couldn’t prove it didn’t work because it didn’t get wet as much as other spoons.

     

      

  

  

It is no secret that the Great Lakes record king salmon, caught in 2021 out of Ludington, Michigan, was caught on a Moonshine Raspberry Carbon spoon. Word got around fast. Over the years we’ve caught plenty of fish using that spoon on Copperhead II, but think of the odds now! As soon as word spread about the record salmon, tackle stores sold out in hours of Raspberry Carbon. I’m sure a plethora of fish are getting caught on Raspberry Carbon spoons, but more people are running them. The odds of someone catching a king salmon on a Raspberry Carbon spoon have grown exponentially not because of the lure itself, but because the number of people running it and likely on multiple rods has now increased.

 

When To Implement “Confidence” Lures

There’s a right time and a wrong time to implement experimental lures. Obviously, tournament mornings are not the right time to implement a spread of neglected lures in the bottom of your tackle box. Now, when consulting your journals and notes from pre-fishing you can identify lures without your subconscious bias interfering. This in turn will give you even more confidence on tournament morning when you select the “A-team” line-up to start with.

The self-fulfilling prophesy can affect anyone from the weekend warrior to the tournament pros and charter boats. Simple recognition of this nuance is a good start to catching more fish. Fishing is more than just the physical aspect of catching fish. “Fishing,” especially tournament fishing, brings with it a mental aspect that goes deeper than most people recognize and the anglers that do recognize this are the ones who dominate the scales.

 

Keeping a journal is the simplest way to recognize your biased selection of lures, locations, and methods. Many anglers already keep a journal that typically includes information like weather, location, fish caught, what fish were caught on, etc. 

 

For more tips, fishing reports, and tournament life, follow our “Never Satisfied” blog at copperheadfishing.com and find and follow us on Facebook at www. facebook.com/Copperheadsportfishing and Instagram at www.instagram.com/copperheadsportfishing.

 

 

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