Combat Tactics
Proprietary pros strategize on a number of levels.
Diversion. The old switcharoo. It’s been used forever to fool combative enemies and opposing athletes. And among fishing guides, it’s a handy tool for separating themselves from people too lazy or unskilled to find their own fish.
Men and women who fish professionally rely on experience to find quality spots, and their clients pay handsomely to be guided.
Nobody on a guide’s boat—especially the guide—wants to be shadowed by a boatload of fishermen who know little more than the fact that the boat they see belongs to a pro, so it must be headed toward a giant school of fish.
To provide clients more time alone in prime water, guides have developed a few ruses to elude those pesky shadows.
Two telltale signs of active gamefish are small oily slicks (when they’re feeding below the surface) and diving gulls (when they’ve chased shrimp or baitfish to the surface). To steer inexperienced anglers astray in either situation, guides often carry a bag of corn chips.
The chips are quite oily—enough so that they’re used for emergency fire-starting by some Alaskan guides— and sea gulls just love them.
If you’ve seen how jet fighters and attack helicopters eject super-heated flares to confuse and distract heat-seeking missiles, you know what to do with corn chips to confound inconsiderate anglers.
In any bay where slicks are popping or birds are working, toss random handfuls of chips subtly overboard as you ride across the water. The oily sheen appears almost instantly, and keen-eyed gulls see the chips from a great distance.
Unknowing anglers can’t help but stop to make some casts—as the pro and his customers continue to look for legitimate opportunities.
An old guide friend who fishes nearshore tournaments told me he keeps several old, meaningless advertising banners in a storage compartment. When he stops to pre-fish a spot, he hangs one—shoe store, auto parts, bakery, whatever’s handy he can find—off both sides of the boat. The reaction is predictable, he says. Other boats don’t even slow down.
During wade-fishing season in Galveston Bay, it’s common for sportsmen to follow guides to fishy shorelines, where amateurs are often so discourteous as to anchor and roll into the water less than 100 yards from the pro’s boat.
Capt. Mickey Eastman, a veteran with whom I fished many times when he was a young guide and I a young outdoor writer, has a solution for that problem.
When he realizes a boat is following him toward a good wading spot, Eastman goes to an area nowhere near where he really wants to fish, slows to idle, and putters toward the shoreline.
His fishermen are instructed to fiddle with their wading gear and rods but not get out of the boat. Anglers in the other boat, eager to get first shot at Eastman’s spot, can’t wait to slide into the water. Once they have and shuffled 30 or 40 yards away, he refires his outboard, idles politely back to open water, hits the throttle and disappears.
If you think chasing pros will fill your fish box, know these two things: 1) If guides know you’re in their wake, they’ll never go to their top spot. 2) Corn chips, beauty-parlor banners and false wades aren’t the only tricks they use to leave you holding an empty sack.