Kind of Blue
March 16, 2009
When trumpeter Miles Davis came of age in the mid-1940s, the dominant voice on his instrument was that of Dizzy Gillespie. Davis wanted the sort of recognition and status that Gillespie enjoyed, but there was a small problem – he couldn’t play nearly as fast and couldn’t hit the same notes. By any objective standard, Davis’s technical skills were lacking.
Despite his shortcomings, over the course of his four decades in jazz Davis became every bit as much of an icon as his predecessor by developing his own style. Where Gillespie attacked the music with blistering runs in the upper ranges, Davis “filled” space with sparse phrasings at more attainable levels, but the silences and pauses spoke volumes.
A decade later, saxophonist John Coltrane joined Davis’s band. Coltrane was a consummate tinkerer and technician, holing himself up in a practice studio for hours at a time, exploring new ideas and theories, testing the limits of his instrument and his imagination. He played so fast, so many notes, that later his style was described as “sheets of sound,” antithetical to the laconic solos that Davis played. Where Davis was measured, allowing the notes left unplayed to say as much as the ones that he let out, Coltrane had to sound everything out. His phrasings were precise, too, but at times it seemed like neither the limits of the musical form nor that of his instrument could contain all of his ideas. Still, their styles clicked – not only can practitioners of an art form have widely divergent approaches to the same piece of music, but even when they play together their disparate voices can remain individualistic without compromising the integrity of the performance as a whole.
At one point, Coltrane seemed to have trouble ending his improvised solos. He’d build around the given chord changes, express his ideas, and then branch off from his earlier expressions. Each line related back to the one before it, and to the underlying composition, but they built and built and built. A snowball doesn’t slow down as it grows; it just gets bigger and bigger until it becomes a seemingly unstoppable mass. So too did Coltrane’s solos gain force as they went on and he couldn’t find the release valve to bring them to a comfortable end.
Finally he asked Davis for advice on how to end his solos. The typically understated response: “You just take the horn out of your mouth.”
I was reminded of that conversation and the different yet complementary styles of Davis and Coltrane last week while fishing my first club tournament of the year. My style, even on practice days, is to “dance with the one that brung me.” I have a certain set of confidence baits, in colors determined by local forage and/or water color, and I tend to stick with what I have tied on. If I have ten or so rods in the rod locker at the beginning of the day, the odds are that the lures tied on them at the end of the day will be exceptionally similar, if not exactly the same as those that I began with. In fact, I occasionally go through a whole tournament without digging into my storage boxes once – I start off the day with a few bags of plastics and some terminal tackle either in my pocket or tucked in a Ziploc bag under the windshield and that’s all I need.
My theory has always been to not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. I suppose there’s always something that’ll catch ‘em better, but unless shown it’s usually hard for me to believe that a green pumpkin Senko will dramatically outfish a green pumpkin Senko with red flake. And with plastics it’s easy, just swap ‘em out. But with crankbaits, spinnerbaits and topwaters, I’d rather keep a bait wet and in the right area than spend valuable time retying with a bait that might not be any more effective, if at all. I’ve always believed that location is the most critical variable, followed by depth, retrieve speed, lure size and profile – with specific baits and minute color adjustments trailing by a fair distance.
So I became frustrated with my draw partner’s constant re-rigging and bait changing. On practice day, when the bite was tough, he was all over the map – we got strikes on finesse plastics, small shad-colored spinnerbaits, small crankbaits and topwaters. To the extent he wanted to experiment, I’d have preferred that he try to refine what we already knew worked. But he was throwing square-bills, hollow-bodied swimbaits, spoonbill jerkbaits, everything that Bass Pro Shops offers and a few items that they don’t. We were running and gunning, and we’d get to a spot, he’d dig into his tackle bag, find something he wanted to try, get it on the right rod, and by that point we’d be halfway through the stop. I started to feel like he wasn’t contributing to our pattern (aka, the “musical composition”), instead focusing on finding some oddball bait that might make his “solo” a game-changer, but was more likely to result in nothing good.
I’m all for trying out new stuff. I think of past “experiments” – the War Eagle Spinnerbait, the Senko, the RC 1.5, a few other odds and ends, that have become critical parts of my arsenal, year in, year out – but the misses are more frequent than the hits. There are tons of baits I’ve tried that either weren’t going to work in my typical fishing, or else I just hadn’t figured out how to employ them best. There are others that I still haven’t had time to mess with – the Swimming Senko, hollow-bodied swimbaits, tackle boxes full of subtle variations on a theme – but I save those for my fun fishing days, when nothing is on the line.
During the course of the tournament, my partner continued to mess with different lures, seemingly wasting valuable time in search of some magical lure. I caught all of my fish on a Sugoi Splash, a green pumpkin Senko (some with a chartreuse tail) and an Aaron Martens Scrounger tipped with a small fluke. The flukes and Senkos were in my pocket, along with a pack of hooks (tucked safely inside the pack of Senkos, to avoid accidentally impaling the family jewels in a most uncomfortable way imaginable). In the two tournament days, I never went into my main tackle storage area during tournament hours. I retied when necessary, but otherwise kept my baits wet as much as possible.
To be honest, after a while I started to feel a sense of moral superiority over my partner. It wasn’t a team tournament, so the only person he was hurting was himself. In fact, he was probably helping me at times – without having to consider boat position and how it affected his casting angles for long periods of time as he retied, I could do whatever I wanted to provide myself every advantage possible. But it was frustrating nevertheless to watch someone wasting so much time. I caught more and better fish than he did. Some of that was attributable to the fact that I was in the front of the boat and got first shot at most targets, but I think a portion of it was his constant fiddling. As I thought about it during the tournament and on the drive home, I started to draw a line in the sand, “us versus them,” those of us who are focused on catching fish and those of us who want to mess around with baits all day.
It can be comforting to set up a dichotomous world, good and bad, right and wrong, those of us who keep our baits wet and those of us who waste time. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it’s an artificial distinction. This epiphany came to me as I considered my trip to Falcon Lake last month. The second day we were there, Kurt Dove and I got onto a pretty good spinnerbait bite. We caught quite a few fish, including some heavyweights, fishing a mixed bag of spinnerbaits (I did change some that day, either because I lost them or because those nasty fish tore ‘em up). But the next day, I fished with my friend Lee Byrd, and that’s when we, or I should say Lee, really dialed in the bite. He wasn’t trying out odds and ends, instead he set out to find the optimal spinnerbait for the situation. Out came a Plano box full of components and he experimented with skirts, blade sizes and blade textures until the quality bites started coming more regularly. When he started really kicking my ass, that’s when I started to ask about the “hows” and “whys” of his adjustments and it all came together. Once he settled upon the formula, the tinkering tapered off, but never ceased completely. It wasn’t aimless or haphazard. The searching had a purpose.
So that realization pushed me back a step, down from my internal soapbox, away from my perch of moral superiority. There are at least two ways to skin a cat. You can be a technical virtuoso and have no soul. You can have limited tools but make beautiful music. But whether you commit to a single lure or fling a constantly changing group as the day progresses, that by itself doesn’t tell me whether you’ll have success. Every bait, like every note, has to have a purpose. My goal for the year is to be a little less tone deaf.
A Choice Quote
March 14, 2009
“I’m glad you’re not an equestrian.”
--Uttered by my uncle at my wedding upon noticing that the centerpiece vases had live goldfish swimming in them. Shortly thereafter my college friends started swallowing the fish whole.
No Rats
March 11, 2009
Dinks, shorts and peckerheads….all of those terms refer to fish that are too small to keep.
But there’s another category of fish that’s referred to in terms not quite as derogatory but far from complimentary – the bare keeper. I typically refer to them as “swimmers,” as in “I could only manage five swimmers today.” I’ve heard a couple of pros refer to them as “chips.” But another way of saying it is “rats.”
I’ve always assumed that the term came from out west. Maybe it did, but that perception may result from the fact that it’s Gary Dobyns who I’ve heard use the term most dismissively. When he’s talked about “fishing chicken,” Gary has said that there’s nothing he hates more than a livewell with five rats that he’ll have to cull. 
But either the term isn’t left coast in origin or else it has spread eastward now, because not only do you hear it on this side of the country, but also in bass strongholds like deepsouthtexas (they talk slow down there, but for my purposes this is one word – Del Rio is to Houston as Princeton is to Jersey City, just a completely different animal.). I know this because when I was down in Zapata last month I happened upon a brand of rods I hadn’t previously seen up close – Power Tackle (www.powertackle.com), a Del Rio-based company owned by Tim Reneau. I had heard of them because Elite Series pros Mark Menendez and Brian Clark had recently signed deals with the company, but that was the extent of my knowledge. But I could have been bowled over with a shakey head when I learned that one of their rod series is called “No Ratz.”
It’s a take-no-prisoners concept, rods aimed not at filling out limits or just catching a few swimmers for fun. These are serious whipping sticks. I was intrigued. Maybe it challenged my testosterone levels to see such a ballsy concept. All week long at Falcon, Kurt Dove had been telling me about the merits of certain swimbaits and other big fish techniques, and despite my contention that they wouldn’t work on my home waters (formerly his home waters – he just moved to Texas from Virginia last fall), he did everything but call me a wuss for not throwing them at home. I like frogging and flipping with heavy braid, but haven’t really embraced the big bait phenomenon yet. After listening to him talk for a few days – and seeing some hellacious strikes on a Magnum Spook – I vowed that this year I’d make a concerted effort to add some of the big slabs of meat to my arsenal.
When I saw the Power Tackle rods again the next week at the Classic Expo in Shreveport, I was sold. I’ve never been a loyalist to any particular brand of rod – a recent informal survey of my rod locker and garage confirmed that I have at least ten brands in the regular rotation, with a few more in reserve (I would have gotten an exact count but that would have required taking off my shoes to use my toes when I got to double digits) and I knew that one more team represented wouldn’t upset the mix. So the day after I got back home, I ordered a 7’6” PG-105 flipping stick. Actually, at first I ordered a PG-104.5, but Reneau then called me and convinced me that the 105 was the better rod for what I was planning to do. Good attention to the customer to go along with a bad ass looking rod.
I’m not gonna blow smoke and say that it’s the greatest flipping stick I’ve ever used, because I haven’t used it yet. The grass mat flipping bite won’t get good here on the river for a few more months, but I’m dying to drop a big jig or a creature bait down through the thick stuff, feel the bite and pull back into the seemingly immovable force of a big bass hiding under the canopy. I’m anxious to get out there, topwater, crankbaits, spinnerbaits and little worms be damned, and just flip for a whole day – the “only need five good bites” approach to life. No rats, indeed.
Backlash
March 4, 2009
“It’s an adventure every time you press the button.”
--The late David Wharton, speaking about a brand of reel that shall remain unnamed.
Crash Test Dummies
February 28, 2009
I’ve been in a serious car accident, but I never thought I’d get into a vehicle-on-vehicle collision on the water. Sure, I’ve hit stumps and floating debris, even came close to colliding with an overzealous jet skiier who came out of nowhere, but the idea of hitting another bass boat never really crossed my mind. Most of the tournament organizations stagger take-offs enough to preclude that possibility and to be quite honest, even though most of my fellow competitors are speed freaks and adrenaline junkies, they’re also careful about how they drive their boats. Jump over a sandbar? Sure. Play chicken with another 3,500 pound, 70 mph water-borne rocket? Not so fast.
So as Lee and I made our way back to the ramp at Falcon State Park around 6pm on a foggy Tuesday, I was thinking more about a shower, a dry change of clothes and a hot meal than I was about the possibility of disaster. We hadn’t seen more than a half dozen boats all day, and at its current level I think Falcon is somewhere north of 80,000 acres, so what were the chances? Besides, Lee has been behind the wheel of a boat since he was a kid and has probably logged more hours on the water than anyone I know, so I felt safe in the passenger seat of his Champion. In fact, I felt pretty good – we’d gotten onto a pretty good spinnerbait bite that day, we each had a 7-pounder to our credit and the trip to south Texas was shaping up exactly as planned.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a big Ranger overtaking us from the starboard rear. Actually, it happened so fast that I couldn’t quite process that it was a Ranger, just that we had a boat ready to climb onto our rear deck. We swerved away and the other guy, hood pulled tight over his face, did so a second later.
I felt a bump, not the heavy-duty impact I expected, the one that would fling us into 65 degree water, but enough to register. Lee later said that he expected the other guy’s propeller to come in through the side of the boat and chew him up into fish food.
What shocked me even more than the collision itself is that the other driver just kept on going. As we stopped to collect our wits, he just plugged along as if nothing had happened. We were a few miles from the ramp, and darkness was approaching, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he wanted to get back safely before exchanging info, but perhaps he was just trying to pretend like he had avoided hitting us, which would have been pretty stupid because it was a wrapped boat with the dude’s name written all over the side. He’s a former FLW Tour pro, not a well-known one, but known to me because I’m the Rainman of things like this.
In 2007, while I was fishing with Kevin Van Dam on the California Delta, we were idling down a canal when an old shirtless man came to the back of his houseboat and started cursing at KVD to slow down. Kevin, who was already well under the legal speed limit, slowed down even further, but the old man kept up his stream of expletives. At that point, Kevin stopped the boat, backed up, looked the guy square in the eye, and told him to “Watch your language.” I asked him why he didn’t let the guy have it better than that and he told me that with your name on the side of your boat, to do so would be career suicide.
Obviously, Mr. Former FLW Tour Pro (MFFLWTP) didn’t get the same training as KVD.
Lee dropped me off at the ramp, MFFLWTP did the same with his partner, and then idled away. Lee idled over and asked him if he was ok. “Yeah,” he replied, then added, “But it could have been a lot worse.”
We got the boats on the trailers and proceeded to inspect Lee’s. A scratch or two, ones that could be buffed out, nothing more. I fully expected to see a big chunk of glass missing. Lee seemed strangely calm, but I was pretty frustrated. I walked over to the other boat.
“What happened? Did you just have your head down and your hood on?” I asked.
“What do you mean? It was your fault,” the driver’s partner said. “You came up on us. I heard your motor coming from behind us.”
I’m no physicist, or soundologist, in fact I could barely pass 9th grade biology, but I kind of think that a boat in front of another, going 50-60 mph, wouldn’t hear another coming up from behind. Just seems to make sense to me that the only way you’d hear another outboard over your own is if you were the trailing boat, but that’s just me.
MFFLWTP inspected his boat and saw that some of his Ranger stickers and a small part of his wrap had been worn away, but that there seemed to be no further damage. He was inclined to let the whole thing drop. That ate at me – I wanted some sort of contrition, some sort of apology, but they weren’t inclined to give it. Lee seemed calmer than me, but he still wanted to exchange insurance info with the other guy, who resisted at first. I assured Lee that I had MFFLWTP’s address and phone number at home through my writing resources, in case he resisted further, but he didn’t. They got each other’s info and we made the half hour drive back to the hotel.
I’m still mad about it – mad that it happened at all, mad that MFFLWTP was such a jackass – but I don’t know what to do. I want to take some broader lesson away from this, but that seems trite. My friend Gary Dobyns got messed up pretty bad in an unforeseeable one-boat accident last year, but the two things are so dissimilar that there’s no comparison to be drawn. It goes without saying that we need to be careful out there, so I’m not going to invoke that cliché.
Should I call the guy’s title sponsor, the one who wrapped his boat? I don’t know. For all I know, the passenger could have been the owner of the company. Would it do any good? Would it make him be more careful in the future? Would it make me feel any better?
I suppose I’m just glad that what could have been an absolute disaster didn’t ruin a great vacation or anything more in the long-term. I went to Falcon fearing that a rattlesnake or a tarantula might try to hop in the boat, very nearly got mashed up in a ball of gelcoat, but in the end the only injuries were sore thumbs.
Would You Buy A Used Car From This Man?
February 27, 2009
How can you tell when a bass pro is lying?
His lips are moving.
Look carefully at this picture of Elite Series pro James Niggemeyer and the new Sexy Swimmer from Strike King. Without the benefit of a soundtrack or a caption you can’t really tell what’s going on, but it’s a scene you’ll rarely see with a professional angler in the middle of it.
I went up and asked James to explain what he likes about the bait and why it’s better than comparable items from other manufacturers. His response was to tell me that he hadn’t fished it yet (that bait is one of the first six off the production line) and that I should ask someone else at Strike King for an explanation.
Let me get this straight – a bass pro deferring on an opportunity to run his yap? Unwilling to lie through his teeth to explain why his sponsor’s product is the greatest thing since crunchy peanut butter and beer in a can? C’mon, man, at least give me the song and dance about “superior components” and “decades of on-the-water testing and refinement.”
Nope. None of that.
The bottom line is that when James tells me a product is good at some point in the future, I’ll believe him.
There is some integrity left in a world largely comprised of patch pirates, ship jumpers and sponsor whores. I’d buy a boat, a truck or a bait from James with confidence.