Fishing Articles
Innovative Bank Fishing
By covering every aspect of each hold bank fishermen
can easily compete with boaters
Timothy Kusherets
Before making a single cast always take the time to scan fishable water
even if it means risking snags like this overhanging set of branches.
The inset salmon of lying on the ground and the jumping fish were both
caught beneath the many snags on the far side of the bank. Note the
seam that forms just beneath the foliage. The best way to fish this
stretch of water was to cast even closer to the bank and the risk was
worth the effort. The generally accepted fishing idea is “if you’re
not fishing around snags you’re not fishing where the fish are”.
You’d be surprised how often a great looking seam like this is
glossed over by bank fishermen.
There are so many creature comforts that come with fishing from a boat
that can’t be found when fishing from the bank; but there are
advantages to fishing from the banks of water that boaters will almost
always look over. Bank fishing allows for each section of water to be
thoroughly planned, dissected, and probed to ferret out those hard to
get fish that are sure to be missed by boating fishermen. Don’t
miss understand, boating has many advantages over fishing from shore,
and I love fishing from boats, but when it comes to being creative about
fishing nothing beats innovative bank fishing. The first step to being
successfully innovative means to plan out where you intend to fish before
even getting to the water.
Planning always starts with the body of water found on Topographical
maps, road maps, and trail maps; they identify the best ways to get
where the fish are before ever leaving the house. Topographical maps
show you the incline of where you want to fish and the elevation of
water. Well informed fishermen know that “slope” has everything
to do with current of the water and steep inclines in the water also
means that the same incline can be found on trails; this dictates what
to take along on the trip and how to trim the fat on weight. The steeper
the incline of each trail and road will dictate how heavy the gear should
be. Remember, for every direction to the water there is the trip back
to consider, and that all translates into physical effort, which could
easily turn into hardship if too much gear is taken along on the trip.
Road maps will show the shortest routes to take and how much money will
be spent in gas. In today’s environment of ever climbing costs
of petrol fishermen know that gas now plays a key role in how far we
can travel and how much money can be spent on something that has almost
nothing to do with fishing, that is, until now. When fishing just down
the road, local maps will do fine for finding the best fishing access
points, but if the trip is over an hour away, as it is for many of us,
then consider taking along a highway map, which illustrate fisheries,
boat launches, and put-ins. Trail maps show hidden places that will
almost never appear on any other type of map. Trail maps will take fishermen
off the beaten path to those areas not known to most outdoorsmen, or
boaters, and expose the best locations for fishing from the bank or
shore. After using the trail map to find the best holds is when it’s
time to dissect the water for innovative bank fishing be successful.
Dissecting the water is pretty easy when you’re actually looking
at it and maps won’t tell you what the eyes can, so it’s
best to wait until you actually get to the water before figuring out
where you want to fish “exactly”. It has been said that
you can easily take about eighty percent of rivers and lakes and discount
them as places that fish will not hold in, which makes about twenty-percent
of any body of water fishable. The physiological makeup of each species
of fish will dictate exactly where they prefer to hold. What is good
for one fish may not be good for another, which makes that “saying”
of eighty-percent an iffy one of you fish multiple species like I do;
so, let’s assume that most anadromous species of fish are in the
water and go from there. Varying currents create holds where fish can
be found, that is how fish find food and that is how fishermen find
fish. Eddies, Seams, and Slots are the hold bank fishermen must look
for when dissecting fishable water. Bodies of water that are either
large in circumference or long rarely offer great places to hold from
shore, so when looking at the water look for disturbances on the surface.
Eddies are always formed by an outcropping of land that juts outward
from the bank. To fish an eddy, always fish downstream from it and fish
the farthest seam away from the bank, this is where many species of
fish will be holding. The seam is the farthest “line” of
water from the bank that shows two currents, one fast and the other
slow. Predators wait in the slow water for bait to come to them from
the fast, this is how fish catch their prey and this is how larger fish
should be caught. Slots and Drop-offs are very similar in feature, but
vary greatly in depth. Slots are exactly what they sound like; the configuration
of an electric car track has slots in them the same way they can be
found in rivers, Hydrologists call this a “Scouring” effect.
Predator fish will hold inside the slot, where water speeds run slower,
waiting for prey to swim in from fast current. Drop-offs are really
any underwater “cliffs” that offer places for smaller fish
to hold where eddies are formed, as a consequence of the drop-off, larger
fish patrol them looking for an easy meal, which is where you can usually
find intrepid boaters fishing, but this is about bank angling right
now, and probing is the next fishing technique to innovative bank fishing.
Probing water is about finding fish from casting out and reeling in,
and that’s it. This fishing technique can be done with just about
any kind of gear. Most of the time probing is done is when there are
huge bodies of holding water where smaller holds cannot be found; however,
probing covers a huge portion of any body of water very fast thus making
this fishing technique productive and fast. Water clarity dictates just
how far each subsequent cast should be and that’s the only tricky
part of probing. Turbid water is an excellent time to fish since the
low visibility of the water does put fish on the bite, but also means
that it’s harder to get them on the hook since most fish will
literally have to have each offering placed right in front of their
noses. Always cast near the shore or bank of where the hold is first
and work out towards the far bank. If the water has about six feet of
visibility then every cast after the first should be six feet. If the
water has less than a foot then every cast after the first should be
about a foot until the entire hold has been covered. Probing can be
done in any hold and is the single fastest way to ascertain if fish
are on the bite. Probing water has never failed to produce fish for
me, and when the fishing gets hard it’s always a nice backup fishing
technique, as are the others.
Hands down, innovative bank fishing is far and away more flexible than
boating ever will be, but remember, there is a trade off. Fishing from
a boat allows fishermen to gain access to areas that many bank fishermen
cannot get to, and they can cover more territory on the same trip; but
fishing from a boat tends to make wanting to move onto the next hold
more impulsive rather than thought through, and that is where innovative
angling comes in. Taking time to examine maps, dissect water, and probing
holds allows bank fishermen the unique opportunity to fish water “thoroughly”.
By covering every aspect of each hold bank fishermen can easily compete
with boaters of productivity with getting fish on the hook, and that
is what fishing is all about for innovative bank fishing.
Take a close look at the water of this river. Note the color variation
from the water I’m wading, using the side-step method,while
I battle a hooked salmon from that of the water further out in the
river. The shallow water is darker largely due to the color of the
riverbed, which is laden with silt. The deeper water has a hue of
brighter blue with riffles on the surface. The contrast makes it easy
to see where the drop-off is and at the surface is the seam. Ideally,
there are a few different ways to fish this area and all of them take
some time to effectively cover the reach. The seam between the two
depths of water create opportunities for drift-fishing, bobber-jigs,
spoons, spinners, flies, crank-baits, and natural baits. Depending
on what fishing discipline you decide to use each cast starts either
on the deep side or shallow side of the seam, but all of them begin
in relatively the same area. It all comes down to how much time one
is willing to invest largely on the basis of confidence of fish in
the water. During many times of the year anglers can depend on the
fact that most species of fish will not disturb the surface indicating
their presence. In almost all cases it’s left to the angler
to depend on his or her ability to “read” water to figure
out how well any one area will produce. In this particular case I
absolutely knew that this area “could” produce it was
just that there wasn’t any visible fish sign to prove it so
using various fishing techniques was the only recourse. Completely
covering a reach of water effectively is almost solely based on patience
and how much time a fisherman is willing to commit to it. Most boaters
enjoy the ability to cover vast distances in a short period of time
and gain access to water that almost all bank fishermen cannot reach;
however, the premise of mobility makes almost all boaters, including
me sometimes, anxious enough to gloss over most bodies of water…this
is where being an innovative bank angler pays off.
The techniques used to cover this water were based on speed, depth,
and visibility. Understanding how to read water I covered a wide array
of techniques before hitting into this huge springer chinook flailing
about on the end of the line. Landing this fish would not have been
possible under typical boating conditions since it took a considerable
amount of time to effectively cover the entire area.
© Timothy Kusherets, 2006/09 |
