(Editor's note: BassFan Charles Bowman is a structural engineer who lives in Kernersville, N.C. He regularly competes in BFL tournaments and often fishes tour-level events as a co-angler.)
How many times have we heard of a professional basketball player, or a professional football player, or a professional boxer, or any other professional athlete, who did not study the weaknesses of an opponent before competing against him?
Never.
What professional athlete, competing in hand-to-hand sport with another person, doesn't do his or her best to break down and understand the tendencies of an opponent's actions and reactions prior to competition?
None.
All professional athletes study or "scout" their opponents prior to competition. In boxing, a professional boxer prepares for his bout months in advance. He learns and understands how his future opponent fights. He studies weaknesses in his opponent, such as the tendency to drop one hand, or a laziness to defend this midsection.
In professional bass fishing, this element of preparation –understanding the biology and psychology of a bass prior to beginning a career as a professional angler – appears to be missing.
Anglers, including myself, try our very best to understand the seasonal conditions of a body of water prior to fishing a tournament there. The seasonal movements of bass, the type of water we're fishing, the forecasted weather – these are very important in the preparation for a bass tournament.
But beyond these things that we all study, do we actually understand our opponent?
Many times I've heard or read where anglers mention what they felt contributed to the success of their tournament day. I've heard many anglers state that a scent applied to their baits contributed to their success, or maybe rattles in a bait. And yes, I've heard that a bait's certain shake or vibration contributed to success.
While in many cases this may appear to be true, is there any scientific basis to support the angler's thoughts on a successful tournament day? Could a 15-pound day have been a 20-pound day had he understood his opponent a little better?
In other words, could an understanding of the biology and psychology of a bass help us better understand why the bite is strong on any given day?
I began to question my understanding of why fish bite when I recently read a book regarding bass and their physical and mental makeup. On a trip to my local bookstore a few months ago, I stumbled upon a book entitled Knowing Bass by Keith Jones, Ph.D.
Dr. Jones studies bass and bass behavior as a scientist working at the Berkley Fish Research Center in Spirit Lake, Iowa. While reading Dr. Jones' book, I quickly found that I don't know as much about bass as I thought I did.
While reading Knowing Bass, I quickly found that I often assume a bass senses its surroundings like I do. I've since learned that bass are not people.
When we think about what a bass sees, or smells, or feels, or tastes, we often liken its senses to our own. When we think about a bass and how it senses its prey, we need to think like a bass, and not think that a bass is thinking or sensing like us.
For example, according to Dr. Jones' research, a bass doesn't see what we see. Nor does it hear, or smell, or taste, like we do.
How is a bass different? Sight is one example.
According to Dr. Jones, when a bass looks at an image, its brain processes approximately 52 impressions of that image per second. By contrast, a human brain processes only 18 impressions of that image per second. That's why movies work.
When we go to the movie theater, we see a moving image on the theater screen because our brain processes images slower than the speed at which the images are projected on the screen. In other words, since our brains only process 18 images per second, if we project more images than that per second onto the screen, our brain doesn't see each individual image, but is actually "fooled" into interpreting the images to be moving or "alive."
At the same time, as we pull a spinnerbait through the water, the blades revolve around the spinnerbait shaft so quickly that we see a gold or silver flash as part of the bait presentation. A bass, on the other hand, processes images more than twice as fast as we do, and therefore doesn't see the "continuous flash" that we see on a spinnerbait, but instead can actually see each individual blade as it rotates around the shaft.
As long as the blades turn slower than 52 revolutions per second, the blades do not appear to the bass as a blur. Instead, they're viewed as a blade making a progressive rotation around the bait's shaft, with an occasional reflection of light.
So did that 15 pounds of fish that we caught on a spinnerbait react to the flash of the blades, or to the vibration of the blades, or neither? If we had changed from double willow-leaf blades to a combination of willow and Colorado blades, would we have caught 20 pounds of bass?
Perhaps the bass that we caught on the spinnerbait hit our spinnerbait not because he was drawn to the vibration or flash, but because it was simply territorial that day. Could another bait of a bigger profile have been even more effective in drawing a territorial bite?
Visualization is only one of many ways that bass differ from humans in terms of sensing their surroundings. Another good example is in smell.
According to Dr. Jones, in order for a bass to smell a certain scent, it must be water-soluble. Water-soluble essentially means that the scent, on a molecular scale, must be small enough – and be held together loosely enough – that it can be broken up, suspended in, and carried by the water.
Oil-based scents, he says, are not water-soluble and cannot be detected by a bass. The bottom line to this is simple: If your scent isn't water-based, it's probably not helping you catch fish.
Additionally, Dr. Jones has also studied which scents stimulate a bass the most. By far the most stimulating is that of an earthworm. Amazingly, according to research, even though earthworms do not live in water, and the likelihood of a bass seeing an earthworm in nature over its lifetime is virtually zero, bass respond to the scent of an earthworm.
So if bass neither see nor smell as we do, the same goes for taste, vibration detection and response to stimuli like light and pain. If we were more knowledgeable about these items, would that change how we fish?
For example, research indicates that a bass that's caught on a rattling crankbait learns to relate rattles to a negative experience, and will likely not strike a rattling bait for several months afterward.
The bottom line to all of this information is that we need to understand the bass itself to fully capitalize during practice and competition. The more we know about a bass in terms of how it senses its surroundings, what it likes, and what it learns, the better anglers we'll be.
It's the ability to turn a 15-pound bag into a 20-pound sack that separates the superstars from the field. It's not luck that makes this happen. It's not fate. It's a combination of education, understanding, open-mindedness, and a oneness with the bass that allows an average day to become stellar.
