An honest account of a morning that was not working, and the adjustment that turned it.
We fished a small lowland lake in early August, out before six, off the water by eleven. For the first three hours we had one fish between us. This is what we changed.
We started where we had done well in June — a weed edge in about eight feet, working plastics along the outside line. It had been the right call two months earlier. In August the weed had grown to the surface and the edge we remembered no longer existed. We were fishing a spot from memory instead of fishing what was in front of us.
We stopped fishing the edge and started fishing over the top of the mat with a frog. Same water, same fish, entirely different presentation. Four fish in the next forty minutes, all of them from water we had been casting past all morning.
The spot had not stopped holding fish. It had stopped being the spot we remembered.
Two things worth writing down. The first is that a location and a presentation are not the same decision, and we had let one imply the other. The second is that we were slow to change because the morning had been quiet — and a quiet morning is exactly when you should be changing things, not when you should be grimly continuing.
We gave it three hours. It should have been one.
A soft plastic topwater frog with easy walk-the-dog action and a weedless profile that glides over pads, mats, and heavy cover. Durable and built for explosive surface strikes.
One a week. Rigging, water, and what we are throwing.
