Fishing with Dummies...The Idea

I grew up fishing Boston Harbor for stripers and blues. Two years ago family bought a house on a lake in southern New Hampshire and a friend donated a pale green 14' 1969 fiberglass Lucraft that we named "The Worm." Since then I've learned that the only thing fishing for striped bass has in common with fishing for large mouth is the word bass.

So now I'm pretty much starting from scratch. In the last two years I've blindly followed the lead of Charlie Moore and anyone in a fancy bass boat that let me get close enough to ask a couple questions. I've watched hours of youtube clips and read a few books so I know what should work. Despite this, I head out most days on one of a few ponds in Mass and lakes in NH and if I'm lucky I take a couple smallies and on a great day a large mouth. So how does one go from the type of fishing any jerk with a skiff and a couple rubber worms can do to bagging a couple pigs per outing? It's easy enough to read that when they're not hitting shallow one should throw together a Carolina rig and try deeper. The books are all written for those states where the real bass fishing happens like Alabama or some other place where the water's likely to be 78 degrees year round. And I'd love to have a few beers with Charlie Moore but why the hell won't he spend a few more minutes telling me what he's fishing and why? In how many feet of water should one expect a Carolina rig to work? Should there be a worm or a craw on it? What color? Which of the 1,000+ combinations of color, size, and brand should I choose? How slow should I crank? Should I fish it down a hill or up it? Why the hell can't I get a bait caster to work properly? Is live bait cheating? What the f am I doing wrong?

Starting this summer I'm going to take a proper run at this. I'm going to move from tying on a rubber worm and casting it at the shore line regardless of temp or season to having a solid strategy. I'm going to weed through the advice of a thousand different bait sellers, blogs, and tv shows telling me a thousand different ways to catch fish by collecting the data. This blog will store the raw data and results of my experiments. At the least, I'll have a convenient place to log my attempts with mobile posts coming from the lakes. Maybe by using the blog a few comments from others will help me and a person or two move up the learning curve. The goal - go from catching no fish in the ugliest boat on the water to being a fish killer in the ugliest boat on the water.

Fishing with dummies begins.