How (Not?) To Teach Your
Wife To Fish
By Pete Robbins
April 18, 2008
I came into the marriage game a little bit later than many of you – I was 35 when I signed on the dotted line.
Up until that point, I really wasn't ready to make that kind of commitment. I was consumed with fishing and work and still had a bit of immaturity to work out. On top of that, I hadn't met the right person.
But when I started dating my wife Hanna, things were different. Not only did I want to spend more time with her, she seemed to understand the time demands of my all-encompassing hobby. In fact, the day that I knew I'd eventually ask her to marry me was on a vacation to Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. We got up at 5am, fished for smallmouths all morning, docked in town to eat lunch, then fished all afternoon. At nearly 5pm, I said to her that we should probably head in to start getting ready to meet up with friends for dinner. "Let's just stay out and catch a few more," she replied. At that point, I was the one who was hooked.
But going after super-aggressive smallies on the beds in gin clear water is an atypical fishing experience. When we returned home and she joined me in the boat to fish tougher situations, she quickly became frustrated at her inability to catch much. On top of that, I became frustrated at having to constantly instruct her about what I thought were obvious aspects of the sport – as well as at the need to unsnag her lures, untangle her lines, and participate in similar menial chores that took away from my own fishing.
My own impatience was part of the problem. The other contributing factor was situational – with limited time to fish for fun, I wanted to make the most of every minute. On top of that, years of fishing tournaments had made it difficult for me to slow down and express basic concepts. The result was a disconnect – I felt I was giving up too much of my day to help her and she felt I wasn't slowing down enough. The truth was probably somewhere in between.
I described the situation to my friend Steve Chaconas, who guides on the Potomac River. It's his job to take people with limited fishing experience out on the water and get them to the point where they can catch fish on their own by the end of the day.
"You learned through an error and error and error," he said. "But like most husbands you never learned how to teach. I'm in the habit of constantly watching the two people in the boat with me. It also helps that I used to teach algebra."
That conversation gave rise to an idea. Steve would teach my wife how to fish. I'd sit in the back of the boat with a camera and a notepad to document the effort. Hopefully, my chronicling of the day will save some of you the friction that resulted when I tried to teach Hanna to fish. And the lessons aren't just for husbands. They apply equally to wives who want to teach their husbands to fish (had to make that disclaimer to establish my non-sexist credentials) or to anyone who wants to teach a child or other newcomer the fundamentals of the sport.
The Basics
We joined Chaconas on the Potomac on a crisp day last fall. We got into his sleek twenty-foot Skeeter, braced ourselves for a rocket ride across the Potomac and…..idled about a hundred yards to a small grassbed, where he taught her the fundamentals of casting.
He told her that later he'd teach her to become proficient with a baitcasting reel, but for now he'd start with the easier spinning tackle to show some basics that would apply no matter what type of tackle she used.
"I want you to learn how to cast with both hands," he said. "That allows you to do a lot of things. You can hit different angles and you won't get as tired."
He instructed her to "watch the tip of the rod load as you make the cast. It's storing kinetic energy and you can transfer that to make the cast. Every cast you make, pick a target. It's like a baseball strike zone. Ours is relatively big. Major leaguers are just looking to hit a small spot, but you need to pick a target, even if it's just a general one."
He also relied on his past role as a math teacher to force her to think about the mechanics of fishing. "Everything's geometry – casting, setting the hook. It's all angles and triangles. When you retrieve, you steer your bait, when you're fighting the fish the rod is one side of the triangle again. The physical part of the game takes practice. It can only come with time on the water. But meanwhile you can work on the mental part of the game – think about water temperature, clarity, the weather, the season and the depth and speed of your retrieve."
I'm sure there were some fish in the area where we started, but why didn't we start off in one of the known community holes nearby? "The worst thing you can do is to take a novice into a crowded grassbed with 20 tournament fishermen. It's distracting and intimidating. We've started in this wide open area where she can cast at general targets. Later, we'll gradually narrow down the size of the targets."
Bait Selection and Presentation
Steve started Hanna with a small Mann's crankbait, while he plied the grassbed with a Lucky Craft lipless crank.
"People call them 'idiot baits,' but they're not. They're finesse baits," he said. "If you watch your rod tip, you can use two senses instead of one and tell whether you're around grass, wood or rocks. Use your sight and feel and eventually you can back off on sight. Your lures
will tell you what's down there. A lot of times you can't see it, so you'll have to feel for it."
He said that he keeps minimal tackle in the boat to avoid the urge to change lures too quickly. "I want my clients to learn to vary their retrieve speed before they change baits, colors, et cetera. I don't keep 50 colors of worms on the boat. They'd want to try them all and that would miss the point."
Hanna quickly got the hang of casting the spinning rod and was able to make long and semi-accurate throws. Steve cautioned her that a long cast is not always preferable. "It's good and bad," he said. "You can cover a lot of water, but if you're in heavy grass like we are here, if you hook a fish they have more opportunities to escape. On a cloudy day like today, or when the water's dirty, you can get away with shorter casts."
Baitcasting Basics
Once Hanna proved reasonably proficient with spinning tackle, Steve readied a baitcasting combo for her. He noted that there are situations where casting tackle is preferable and he promised that with proper instruction she could cast this gear backlash free in five minutes. If she were to haul off and power cast the way she did with a spinning rod, that wasn't going to happen, though, so he led her through the various steps of the process, starting with the role of the thumb.
"Just start by pressing the button and letting the lure fall to the water to illustrate that you have to stop the spool when the lure hits the water."
After several rounds of drop and fall, he instructed her on how to cast, but it was no KVD quick and powerful roll cast. On the contrary, he had her make an exaggerated lob, taking the rod from 3 o'clock to 12 o'clock with minimal force. "You just want to make a slow-motion lob and feel the line going through your thumb and learning when to stop it. Once you have that down, you can gradually increase your distance."
As promised, within five minutes she was making reasonably accurate and backlash-free casts. Granted, it was a windless day and she was using a heavy lure, but I hadn't thought that possible previously.
"Just remember, it's all hand-eye coordination," he said. "The eye is a muscle, so we practice coordination all day long. Things go bad when we lock in on a focal distance."
For the would-be instructor, he had this to say about equipment: "Don't give your pupil a cheap baitcaster. You need to give them an opportunity to do it right. It helps to have a shorter rod, six to six and a half feet, and don't make the reel any tighter than you normally would. You don't want it super-free. I use a Shimano Curado with two brakes. And be sure to choose a day when there's not a lot of wind."
After a quick refresher course of all that she had learned, he said she was ready to go to the laboratory.
Applying the Lessons
We motored across the river and up a short way to The Spoils, a fish-rich bay off the main river. Two months later, it would produce a new Maryland record largemouth, but on that fall day our goal was to see what Hanna had learned and hopefully get our hands on a few bass.
He started her off with a split shot rig, featuring a Mann's Hardnose Craw behind a quarter-ounce Water Gremlin bullet shaped split shot, which he said goes through cover better than a round shot. Why not a Senko, I asked. After all, it's the most productive lure I know and the easiest for a beginner to use.
"The Senko is a great lure," he said, "but it doesn't teach you all that much. I want my clients to learn what isn’t a fish first – rocks, sticks, grass. Then, when something is different, that's a fish."
He showed her the desired retrieve by moving the craw along the boat's carpet. "Drag it slowly," he said. "You want that weight knocking into cover and creating a disturbance. Don't be in a hurry to get it out of the cover. When you get some resistance, change the angle of your rod, pull it over the stick, and that's when you should expect the bite. Be sure to stop your rod at 90 degrees so you can still set the hook."
While he told her when to expect the majority of the bites, he also noted that fish often tend to bite when you least expect it. "Don't ever take your hand off of the reel handle," he implored.
He explained that they'd start out deep and then work their way in to "the stuff you can see, the heavily fished area." When she got hung up on an unseen piece of wood, he patiently retrieved it and encouraged her to watch the depthfinder as he did it. "Now we've learned something new about this spot," he said.
This wasn't the silent fishing that I've become used to on tournament day. Steve continually thought out loud and encouraged Hanna to do the same. "This is a very versatile rig. You can use a shorter leader if it's muddier, a longer leader if the water's clearer. You can control depth and speed with it so easily; you can use it any time, any place."
Just then, his thoughts were interrupted by an awkward hookset from Hanna. She got the bass into the boat, but even successes were met with gentle reminders to think through the process. "You hooked a fish, felt what it was like and knew what was going on, but then you stopped for a moment," he chided.
He quickly followed her catch with one of his own, a chunky three pounder that engulfed his soft plastic bait. As he reeled it in, he explained what he was doing. "You own him, he doesn't own you."
After the fish was released, he talked about how the strike had occurred and encouraged her to replicate what had worked for him. Convinced that she had a firm understanding of the process, he was ready to move on to the next lesson, a Texas rig or a tube. Experienced fishermen know that it's a never-ending process, but for the beginner, each success is a building block for the next achievement.
The Male-Female Divide
Chaconas said that he is constantly challenged to put his clients on fish despite their limited skills.
"Most of my clients are upscale people, CEOs and other corporate executives. This is important time for them. They can't really work on the skills the way I'd like them to. I almost have to start over each time."
He particularly enjoys repeat customers because they can develop their skill set "step by step by step. It gets to the point where they can plan the trips. They understand the role of the tide and the weather and they know the areas I fish."
He said that women typically take instruction better than men. "It's much harder to teach guys. They don't like to have another guy teach them how to use a tool. And there's the perception among some that fishing is not a sport. But they wouldn't reject help with their golf swing, would they? The guy who takes instruction worst is the guy who fishes a lot. It's all part of the male ego."
He used to not fish at all during guide trips, but now he'll do so depending on the situation. "In many cases my performance is judged on the basis of their performance. There's no luck in this sport and if they have limited skills sometimes I need to fish to be able to tell them what's happening. The most dramatic thing I can do when they think there are no fish around is to pick up a rod, make a cast, catch a fish and put the rod down. The first lesson is humility. When the client tries to catch one while I catch five, it's my job then to sit down and explain how I picked better targets or made three, four or five casts to their one."
Ultimately, he continues to guide because he's a people person and benefits from the trips almost as much as his clients do. "I assume that everyone who comes on my boat, I can teach them something or learn something from them," he said.
Miscellaneous
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Chaconas has a website at www.nationalbass.com.
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In addition to guiding and teaching math, he has worked as a comedy writer and a salesman, so he has one-liners that will explain just about anything. He particularly enjoys guiding clients who don't fish much, and noted that 60% of his clientele are return customers.
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On January 26, 2008, tournament angler Justin Riley caught the new Maryland state record largemouth out of The Spoils, an 11 pound brute.