There was a time where i would get indignant. this stuff grinded my gears.
and then I realized something after a few situations. Most people STINK at fishing. I’m no pro but I put in work and I put in the time and I will move around mercilessly to stay on fish. especially basin fish that are moving around.
1 situation. small borrow pit connected to the river. we are fishing on a spot and catching fish one right after another. a group of people we have no idea who they are come right over and start talking to us and literally just start setting up AROUND us fishing our holes. we continued to catch fish while they (half of them had flashers) just sat there and stared at us hammering them. the fish would need to be lifted probably halfway up the water column to get them to bite. they just sat there. i mean you could see what we were doing different. never clicked for them. and we certainly weren’t going to show them (we were internally livid)
but reflection afterwards we chuckled, those guys jsut watched us put on a clinic and didn’t catch one fish. we caught probably 100 crappie that day between the 2 of us. 5′ away from them. I now know one of the guys fairly well and he told us he and his group of friends think it was fluke and have never fished it again. meanwhile we’ve continued to hammer them year after year.
another time in a bay in a SE MN lake, we were catching crappies like nuts, you had to move from hole to hole as the fish moved around. Here comes some guy on the other side of the bay on a 4 wheeler. you know he saw us catching fish. set up 10′ from us, we weren’t fishing in our 1 mans, you could see everything we were doing. he picked a few of our holes, flipped over the shelter, didn’t say a word and we kept fishing all over him catching all the crappies we could handle. after a few hours, he pulls it open and is like how are you guys catching so many fish!? we were like well we are moving around looking for them. “Hmm interesting” he closed his shack back up and sat in that same spot for another hour before packing up and leaving. Now i judged this guy right away as he was decked out in striker gear and had all the newest fishing gear. but clearly it wasn’t the arrow.
After that, i was like i could care less. because chances are they are not going to do what i do to catch fish. they are going to set up shop or whip out the bobber rods and likely deem that spot dead and that we got lucky.