Fishing without Bernie...

“Confidence catches fish.” It’s one of my favorite fishism’s, and one I wholeheartedly believe in. It’s not a fancy boat, fancy tackle, or any other stuff that really get’s it done…it’s good old fashioned confidence, only earned by way of experience leading to success…which usually comes after much experience that does not immediately lead to success. Confidence is invaluable, and it cannot be bought.

The problem with confidence is that, as Joe Montana pointed out, it is a very fragile thing.

Give me my tackle, a fish I’m somewhat familiar with, and a body of water that at least resembles something normally I fish, and I’m supremely confident. Take away one of those variables and my confidence slips some…take away all three and all bets are off. To really mess things up, make the desired species one that I have struggled with in the few times I have pursued them and it gets really ugly.  

That’s exactly the scenario I found myself in yesterday…and to make matters worse, it wasn’t me that needed to catch fish. Nope, it was a couple guys that had pursued said fish for many years without successfully landing a large specimen, and on top of that, one of which is a longtime supporter of Fishful Thinker TV. Ughhh…

So, it went like this. Dudes want to catch a large lake trout and I want to thank them for their years of support. I connect with laker guru and old friend Bernie Keefe and we set a plan. Twelve hours before we’re to fish, Bernie has an emergency and can’t go…but offers me to use his boat and tackle on Lake Granby without him. Unbelievably gracious of him? You bet…yet all the sudden I’m in panic mode.

Lakers have been my arch nemesis for years and I’ve only fished them a few times total. I’ve only ever fished Granby, a 7000 acre lake, four times on open water and once on ice, and while I’ve fished there three times with Bernie, once was on ice (my inaugural ice fishing expedition no less), once was to film very shallow lakers and browns at ice out, and once for deep summertime lakers. The last scenario is what I was now facing…fish holding on structure 60-90 down that would have to be jigged. Heading into this trip, I’d personally caught exactly six mature lakers in this style of fishing…not exactly expert status! Regardless of all that, now they were looking to me git ‘er done… and to keep it interesting, we had five hours to do it.

Why Bernie’s boat rather than my Ranger, you ask? Because Bernie’s Lowrance units are loaded with the stuff of legend…perfect contour maps that cannot be bought, rather built through many years of recording data. To quote Ed Dentry, “the only thing more secretive than a lake trout, is a lake trout angler”, yet I was now in an unfamiliar boat staring at more than a decade’s worth of data collection. Many people would pay mucho dinero for access to that info, yet now as I sat and stared at the two large HDS screens and all their information, I was slapped by one of my own key concepts…basically that knowledge itself is useless…it’s the application of knowledge that catches fish.

7000 acres of structure all perfectly mapped is worthless unless you can figure out what specific structure the fish want, how to handle the boat to hold over it, and how to get 30 year old fish to bite artificial baits. Oh, and the anglers I was helping had never deep jigged for any species before, much less huge lake trout.

For a fleeting second, I considered bringing an SD card and “borrowing” the data for my own Lowrance units, but stealing a guy’s fishing spots, especially after he graciously loaned them to you for a day, can only lead to untold amounts of bad gu-gu, voodoo, and karma from all sorts of mysterious powers. I’d probably never catch another fish…

 So, long story short, we just went fishing. Basically, we ran around surveying humps, ridges, and saddles adjacent to deep water (as if our target zone of 60-90 feet wasn’t deep enough), marked fish that appeared to be slightly separated from the bottom (as opposed to those planted on the structure which I felt were probably less active than those up a foot or two and moving around), set up drifts that would bring our jigs into their face, and then focused on getting them bite. 

One saving grace in this whole thing is that I’m very comfortable with Lowrance electronics, so that helped a bunch. I split screens allowing me a full sonar view, a bottom zoom view to highlight both fish and our jigs, and two GPS maps…one zoomed out for the big picture of the area contours, and one zoomed in for the spot on spot so to speak.

Did we accomplish our goal? Yes. Each angler caught exactly one fish…but each was the largest they’d ever even seen, and both were very near, if not, Colorado Master Angler size. Bernie told me we were fishing for a half dozen bites in total and we got that many, so I feel pretty good about our morning given that we lost several other fish…hooking large lake trout in deep water is a trick in and of itself.

Would we have caught more fish with Bernie in the boat? Most certainly! There is no match for experience, and like I said…confidence catches fish. All of us would have been a ton more confident with boat captain Bernie leading us. He would have had spots known to be holding fish, rather than me driving around looking for them, and he would have made better decisions in general. That’s typically where fishing days are won or lost.

In my mind, the best outcome of the day, beside the smiles on the anglers’ faces in the dripping fish pics, was the confidence I gained. The next time I hit lake trout water, it’s on…Bernie or no Bernie!