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Having lost sight of our objective, we redoubled our efforts.

—Anonymous

The Formula for Success

The objective of most people who fish is to catch a fish, not just to go fishing. A fish is a dull creature, a pawn of its environment—no match for a human mind. Make that most human minds. Why then do most people fail actually to catch a fish? Because they don’t know how the system works. The system is simple. Yet most books and magazines complicate the issue by giving readers only a few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, not the whole picture.

Despite all the books, magazines, seminars, and “magic” lures, experts have failed to make most people successful at fishing.

Most people settle for second best. They make excuses. I’ve heard people say, “We didn’t catch anything today, but we really enjoyed the boat ride.” Wonderful—I guess you’re easily amused! Sure, it’s great to be outside. Sure, it’s great to be away from it all. . . but wouldn’t you have more fun if you were successful at something you love?

The System Is Simple

To catch a fish, two things must happen:

1. You must get your lure near a fish. (Most people never get this far!) The lure must be close enough to where the fish is, so the fish knows that it’s there.

2.  You must make it want to put the lure in its mouth. (Most people don’t have a clue!) The fish must actually take a piece of plastic, or some other foreign substance, and put it in its mouth. Some fishing lures seem to be designed to make fish run for cover, not munch on them. When we’re fishing, we’re human waiters catering to—of all things—fish!

To make these two important things happen, you must follow a very simple road map to success. In fact, the Flying Lure was designed to help the average person do exactly this: get the lure close to a fish and give the lure a self-contained action that makes the fish want to eat it. The lure is simply a tool to assist anglers on their road to fishing success.

That’s why the Flying Lure has been the best-selling fishing lure in the world for the last several years—because it helps fishermen succeed.

You’re about to learn the secrets of the Flying Lure Success System . and you don’t need a Flying Lure to be successful at many aspects of it.

I developed this system over many years of fishing as well as personally interviewing and observing many of the best fishermen in the world. I developed it after speaking to thousands of people on my national radio show and in seminars around the country. It is a more thorough way to look at fishing than the traditional approaches. It will change the way you fish.

The four P’s are action items for fishermen and are affected by each of the four W’s. We can control each of the four P’s to respond to the four W’s, which we cannot control. The four P’s are the “dials” by which we control the total picture. Learn to work these dials and you’ll have fishing success. Each of the dials we can control are described in their own chapters (see Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9).

All fishing articles ever written fit somewhere into this model of fishing success. All situations you'll ever encounter can be conquered by understanding the Four Steps to Fishing Success and the thirty-three Success Questions that they are made up of. The Success Questions are a Decision Support System, to spur you toward making your own fishing decisions. It’S easy! It will work for you if you give it a try.

In fishing, if you understand the fish and its environment, you’ve got it nailed! Honest! It’s not more complicated than this. I know that it sounds too simple, but it’s true.

The environment consists of four factors: the time and season, weather conditions, water conditions, and the whereabouts, or the bot­tom contours of the body of water you are fishing. The environment is the cause of all fish behavior—at least all fish behavior that affects us.

The fish behave in a way that can be described by the four P’s. The fish will be in a specific place and will require a specific type of lure presentation, location of the lure within a certain distance away from it (proximity), and a certain level of lure persistence.

The P’s are the things we as fishermen can control. The W’s are the things that are handed to us by the environment. We must respond to the W’s in a way that will make us successful. And that is possible!

The following picture shows the rewards of “putting it all together” on a given day.

The Differences Between This System and Other Approaches

The Flying Lure Success System is all-inclusive. It is a checklist of items that will make you ask the right questions no matter where you are fishing. The system also introduces brand-new fishing concepts that beginners and pros can use to catch more and bigger fish, such as proximity and persistence. Many traditional fishing articles describe particular fishing situations, but don’t necessarily give the reader a framework to translate that knowledge to other areas. For example, some traditional structure fishing articles focus on a fish’s whereabouts (our place). Traditional “finesse” fishing articles that describe fishing with plastic worms focus primarily on technique (presentation). The Flying Lure Success System integrates all the important success factors in a way that anyone can understand and apply.

Asking the Right Questions Is 90 Percent of the Battle

My focus is on teaching you how to think for yourself. . . and not on a particular brand of fishing. The biggest gift you can give yourself is to teach yourself to ask the right questions. Then you can take the answers and tie them together in such a way as to give yourself action steps on the road to success.

I have developed a series of questions that will help you ask the right questions and always to seek the truth of what is happening.

Pay attention to the next fishing book or article that you read. Most likely it will tell you what to think, not how to think. Most articles and books try to tell you where, when, and how to fish in a particular way and that’s okay. In fact, that’s necessary, but that’s not what this book is about.

Fishermen owe a great debt to E. L. “Buck” Perry, the father of modern structure fishing. Buck was a former physics professor who first proposed the theory of structure fishing—the forerunner and basis of modern fish-finding methods. The basic tenets of structure fishing included the idea that the home of the fish is deep water and that they make periodic migrations into shallow water to feed, along defined migration routes. Buck would quarrel with the description of structure fishing as a theory. To him it was a fact. Structure fishing gained popularity in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. I cut my teeth on it. Fishing Facts magazine, the proponent of this type of fishing, was my bible. Many writers copied Buck, adopted structure fishing as their own, built on it, and made their careers on it . . . often without thanking or acknowledging him. He was, and will always be, the Einstein of fishing.

But then, in the mid-1970s, came some studies of underwater bass behavior that contradicted pat structure fishing theories. Some studies, such as those done by underwater telemetry pioneer and biologist Mike Lembeck in lakes Miramar and El Capitan in southern California, showed that fish did not all behave in the same way. Mike followed around bass that had transmitters implanted in them and recorded their patterns of movement. Later studies in different lakes confirmed Mike’s findings.

Underwater researchers discovered that there were as many as eight different behavioral groups of bass in the lakes that were studied. Some fish migrated from deep to shallow water, as structure theory suggests. Some stayed in shallow water all the time, in contradiction to the theory. Some roamed around the lake covering great distances in a single day. Some fish suspended near no cover at all (ten feet deep, over fifty feet of water), away from shore and all structure. Some huge bass were solitary loners, not school fish as previously thought. And many fish swam into the NO FISHING zones as soon as the lake was opened to fishermen just to avoid them! How is this possible? Have the fish all gone nuts? Or could they read the signs!?

Structure fishing apologists sprang into action to explain away all behaviors inconsistent with their theory. At the time, the theory was monolithic and allowed for little debate. A fish was a fish was a fish, no matter where it was, said adherents. But the apologists weren’t necessary. Buck Perry had the right idea. Even Albert Einstein himself wasn’t right all the time . . . but he was sure right enough of the time!

Take a look at nature the next time you are outside. Look at birds, dogs, and cats. Do they all behave in the same way? Of course not! For example, cats have different personalities. They respond differently to the same stimuli. Some are aggressive. Some are timid. Some are loners. Some aren’t. There are more exceptions than rules. Ask a cat owner. Can it be said that all cats will generally act in the same way given a set of conditions? Maybe. Maybe not. Underwater photography pioneer Glen Lau has done extensive research on what traits make a bass a large “superbass.” A superbass has different behavioral and feeding characteristics from a lesser “normal” bass. Do you see my point?

If fish were a monolithic community, all tournaments would be won or lost on the same fishing pattern. On any given lake on any given day, there are a number of patterns on which fish are caught: shallow, deep, and God knows where—on lots of different lures!

Fish are different. Believe it! We can make some generalizations based on the work of Buck Perry and others. However, there are nuances of behavior that make a South Carolina bass in Lake Murray different from a Missouri bass in Truman Lake. Not much different, but sometimes just enough! Ask the pros who fish the national circuits. They’ll tell you it’s so. It took me a long time to discover this, as an early adherent of the structure theory. Much of fishing is by the seat of your pants—that is, discovering things about a lake as you go along. Some of your original discoveries can and will be the key to fishing a particular body of water on a given day.

Bill Plummer—One of the Quiet Founders of Modern Fishing

Bill Plummer has probably caught more bass than anyone in history. That is not hyperbole; I believe it is a statement of pure fact. He has caught thousands of bass each year, including an inordinate number of monsters from northern lakes. From ice-out to ice-in, Bill fishes five to seven days per week and has done so for over thirty years. At 2,000 bass per year, which is one of the estimates, that’s over 60,000 bass! He started fishing for bass before modern bass fishing was invented. And he certainly helped popularize it. He has been written up by every major magazine in the industry and is the inventor of the first soft top-water artificial frog, the Bill Plummer Frog.

Bill fishes the simple way—from a wooden boat that he has designed, with oars, no electric motor, no sonar, no bells and whistles, just a small gas motor on the back. He has learned the habits of bass by trial and error and deduction, not by book learning. There were no books to learn from when he first started. He is a solitary hunter, who learns and learns and learns. Bill exemplifies the ideals that we should have as fishermen:

a respect for the fish. . . and a constantly open mind that learns yet is not prone to gimmickry or rigid theories. I have learned a lot from Bill and am proud to call him my friend. Strive always to learn and be flexible. Strive to be analytical like Buck Perry, and adaptable like Bill Plummer.

Sometimes There Are More Exceptions Than Rules

Some lakes behave opposite of what you would expect. Bright, sunny cold-front days were great on Lake Cochituate, in Natick, Massachusetts, in the summertime. These days should have been tough and unproductive. Cloudy days were bad. They should have been good for fishing. I won a tournament on this lake when I was eighteen years old and beat more seasoned competitors from a number of states because I figured out how it worked. I spent months on that lake practicing until I knew exactly how the bass there responded to all types of situations. No book on fishing had these answers.

You Need to Build a Model

You need to build a model in your mind as to how a particular body of water works. For example, “If it’s sunny, fish will generally be here and take this size and color of lure. If it’s cloudy, fish will be shallower and take another type of lure presentation.” You’ve got to visualize it in your mind. You’ve got to almost feel what the fish feel and how they react to the environment. This kind of knowledge for a specific body of water is not found in books or magazines. The one danger of adhering to any theory of fishing, no matter how worthwhile, is that you tend to interpret all data in light of that theory and you may be blinded to obvious facts that don’t fit in. Read all the books and articles that you can, but blend the information in with your own experience and above all, experiment.

Don't Beat Yourself Up!

In the past I’ve made the mistake of applying a specific article that I had read to a specific lake I was fishing, and went away thinking that there was something wrong with me. What was wrong was that the fish in my lake weren’t responding at all like the fish in the article. I was trying to cram the reality of my lake into the article’s framework. It doesn’t work. You can get general knowledge from literature; then you must go out and make your own discoveries. I wish more writers would admit that to themselves and to their readers. You can’t neatly decree a truth in fishing and expect it to be so, everywhere, all the time, even in similar situations.

To find reality, to be a seeker of truth, in fishing, you have to ask questions all the time and learn all the time. I have developed a set of simple questions called the Fishing Success Questions. You will find them explained in Chapters 5 through 9. If you answer them correctly, they can give you fishing success.

The thirty-three Success Questions force you to think about how the environment, or the uncontrollable factors thrust upon us by nature (the 4 W’s), affect the 4 P’s (the factors we can control). If we understand how to take command of the factors we can control, and not worry about those that we can’t, we can become successful at any type of fishing we choose.

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