Fishing Guides Using Live Bait

[Mitch f]

Is it possible that a guide (or perhaps a high percentage of people) using live bait on a body of water has the potential to screw up the fishing with artificials?

I've heard a lot of people claim this, but this seems to me to be a hard argument to make.

[Feathers and Fins]

No.

I use live bait and watch guys pop bass on jigs right after im done. The reverse also holds true I have gone trolling past guys using live bait spider rigging and hammered crappie and walleye .

[Old plug]

In any given spot it might. But I tell you the truth Mitch the older and more time I have on the water the more convinced I become that when a fish hits any kind of lure they are in a active mode. I do not care what it looks like smells like or anything else there is no way a fish is fooled into thinking it is forage if they are not in a active mode.

I had a situation like that about a month ago. This long cove nearby is a magnet for shad in the fall. They were so thick back there you could see shad flipping all the way across the cove for several hundred foot. I was working the dock corners because I knew kentuckies loved to ambush shad from those spots. I was doing just fine for small ones. But out further in the cove there were some good splashing and wakes made by larger bass chasing shad. I thought well maybe I can nail a couple. I went through 6 or 8 lures and never got a one hit. On several occasions I got a cast in front of the charging wake just to see the bass pass it and smack a shad close by. That is an example of selective feeding if I eve seen one. And they do that a lot.

[bfishn]

Never heard of such a thing. By what mechanism or means is this supposed to happen?

[Old plug]

I would think in the case of a group of large Black bass that by reason of season are bunched up in some small spot that a guy could drop night crawlers down there and take most of them MAYBE if he took a couple then rested it then went back to it. Most spots like that or wintertime anyway and I think they would be much more inclined to something like a fresh big crawler just laying there wiggling. The group might be pretty small as well maybe 1/2 dozen fish.

[bfishn]

Lunkers do love nightcrawlers, that's for sure. But how does catching a fish on one hurt a neverbaiter?

[Old plug]

Well i do not think it does. I was only saying that if the fish in that one group were taken and not returned. Other than that if it is some spot that is attractive to bass then there will be more. But it might be sometime before you will find 1/2 dozen group there. That is something that I do not understand. How a place can produce big bass for a few years then nothing but small ones for several years. Maybe they just move on but then why don't more hogs move in????? It must have something to do with either relationships or habits. They might just all return to that place at that time from seasonal habit. It is a mystery to me. I judt start looking again.

[Mitch f]

I first read about this concept in the eighties at Lake Okeechobee where a writer claimed that the resorts in a certain part of the lake caught and released what he thought were the same trophy fish over and over causing what he said was a level of sophistication in the fish that they could only be caught with live bait. He blamed it on the guides using wild shiners caught from local feeder creeks.

[Jerry Rapp]

both lakes are doing very good. I read a lot of Okeechobee reports on shiner fishing, but it is still one of best. LOZ keeps going on like the Energizer rabbit.

[Al Agnew]

Interesting on those Okeechobee bass...on the one hand, if they're being caught multiple times on live bait, it seems like it would eventually make them reluctant to take live shiners, not artificial lures. Then they'd get so hungry avoiding any live shiner they came upon that they'd be easier to catch on something totally different

On the other hand, if being caught over and over made them notice hooks and line attached to "food" and avoid that, then yeah, it would make them tough to catch.