I believe knowing the target species of fish is very important. Almost everything is related on the species and its behavior.
If you are fishing for fun, or just playing by the lake or river in a good day, you may use a single line of any type, a wooden or metal hook made by yourself and a branch of a tree and it may work, but here I want to share tips which can help us achieve better results, and have more fun or more fish for the dinner 🙂
Fishing by rod and hook is actually tricking the fish to think she is reaching for food, hunting for it, finding it or anything else you like to name it. We want to fish to eat the bait or whatever we have on the hook so it traps himself and we catch it.
So first of all we have to know the feeding behavior.
- Some fish are visual feeders, they “look” for food, by their eyes I mean.
- Some sense the smell of the food rather than seeing it.
- Some are like filters, they eat whatever comes forward and filter out the waste and keep the food.
For visual feeders, we need baits which attract the fish visually, for those who smell, we need smelly food and bait, and for the third we can almost do nothing if we use hook instead of the net. Mullet is of the last type, ofcourse it too has some ways of catching which we can later talk about.
The other thing we have to know is that in what condition they start feeding. If you have everything ready and fish is not willing to eat or attack, then you will not catch it. I have stayed at a lake full of brown trouts for several hours without any fish even trying to bite the tons of different lures and bait I had with myself. Well don’t be scared, even if I didn’t catch anything, I enjoyed the lake side and the weather and the nature so much! that is the good thing about fishing.
Then in some ways, consider planning what size of fish you want to catch. The size really matters in this case, you have to have proper line, hook and rod, as well as proper reel.
As we go, you will learn more about this kind of fish behavior. I’ll try to share my knowledge of the some of fish so we can better decide to how fish for the target species.
As an start know that Sport fish like trout, bass and pike are all visual hunters and this is really good for us. Then species like carp, chub (white fish or Sefid Maahi as we say in Iran), catfish and surgeon are more likely to hunt for the smell of the food, smell attracts them more than the visuals, although not absolutly.
Because of this big difference, we normally take two kind of strategy for this two major groups.
More on this in the next post.
Paymaan.
