Theories in Kayak Fishing

[chris138]

I wanted to start this thread to talk about some of the theories behind kayak fishing, and hopefully stir up a lively argument... I mean conversation hahaha.

Many people go online looking for specific details about how, when, where, what to fish. The are lots of great tutorials about say, largemouth bass fishing. But when it comes to big game saltwater kayak fishing, the info is much harder to find.

To me, the details of tackle and presentation and tides and moon cycles and seasonal changes are much less important than just simply having the right mindset going into the thing. There's no wrong way to catch a yellowtail, everyone has their own style. But there are certain things that successful kayak anglers understand that aren't just Xs and Os.

Theory: The one bite principal

I should start saying that this is only intended for people targeting trophy species ie Yellowtail, Halibut, White seabass etc. I would not apply this mentality to a fun day of fishing with family in the kelp beds.

If you are targeting big fish in La Jolla, you should have this mantra in your head: I will get at least one bite from the right kind. Whether you know it, or embrace it or not, you are getting at least one shot at the right kind practically every time you fish La Jolla. Maybe you think you got snagged on rocks, or robbed by a dog, or broke off by a black or sharked or whatever. Its easy to explain away a mistake in that way. Your entire game plan, preparation, and mindset should be that you will stick that one bite.

Although it goes contrary to common sense, you can't always let past performance guide your future actions. You should be a big game fishing robot. If you are fishing for yellowtail all morning, 6 hours straight, and you haven't had so much as a mark on your sonar or a sniff of your bait, you can still get that one bite at any minute. You have to stay focused on that bite. Its only when you get distracted that you don't have a shot... maybe you get bored and have a couple beers or start dropping cut squid for rockfish or throwing hookup baits for Calicos or whatever. Don't let 6 hours of nothingness distract you from that fact that at any minute those slugs could just show up and destroy anything/everything in the water column.

Conversely, maybe you had a very successful yt trip, had multiple bites and hookups and maybe even had a multi-fish day. Awesome! Just don't expect that next time. Reset back to that one bite mentality. You gotta hustle, you gotta grind, you gotta stay alert, you gotta check all your knots.... so when that swim through finally happens and you get your one bite, you're the one with a bloody mess in your lap while everyone else scrambles to figure out what happened. More likely, they never even realize you got bit until they see you at the launch and are about to tell you how slow it was haha

This is similar philosophy to what the freshwater swimbait crowd does, but those guys grind all winter for that one bite in an entire season. This mindset shift really helped me to produce fish on tough days, and to take advantage of those 11am WFO windows when the morning crowd had already given up. Now, on days when I get get skunked, I focus on when and how I had my one chance and what I could've done differently to stick that fish.