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Paying Attention (Guest Article)
by Dave Motes

In my early fishing days, I had a valuable technological device that accounted for dozens, maybe hundreds of fish I would have otherwise missed. The trips when I took it and used it and listened to it were invariably more productive than those I didn't. It was a cheap, but somewhat rebellious device, and also occasionally generated a bad smell; I was happy to put up with these shortcomings in return for the many cases of tennis-ball-thumb that were directly attributable to its capacities. That device was my fishing buddy, Butch Murphy. Butch is no genius, and though he has excellent fishing instincts and skills, his advice isn't what I'm referring to. The thing Butch has, and which I attempted to develop, is a memory.

We're not talking basic memory here, the kind that helps you to remember your kids' names and the relative merits of 300 different beers and the lyrics to every song ever released by Jethro Tull; no, we're talking a special kind of memory, one that more unenlightened folk (i.e., wives) might consider a waste of grey space. We're talking Fishing Memory.

Obligatory anecdotal example: One May eighties day Butch and I were paddling his canoe across a shallow Lake Manassas bay, heading toward another weed-edge where we hoped to bust more largemouths on our Buck and Bunnies and Dahlberg Divers. Butch pointed to a dark spot on the lake bottom about fifty feet to port and said, "That rock shadow there, that's where you caught that walleye that time." My responses were typical. I said, "Are you sure?" and "I thought it was the other bay," and "Was that here?" and "What walleye?" and "Huh?", but I was casting as I spoke. Butch casually remarked that I had taken that walleye on a half-and-half grub, not the tube that I had on now; he could also have mentioned that that same day I'd fallen out of the boat and we'd seen a wild turkey and been late for work--but I was busy setting the hook on my new walleye.

See, Butch remembers stuff like that. I'm not sure if he does it on purpose, as I now try to do, or if he's just a Rain Man savant with a special skill for remembering lures and places and seasons and conditions and the characteristics of strikes. Oh, and the exact weights and lengths of fish caught, which prevents the normal growth process of caught fish over many tellings. He and I have probably fished together four hundred times, and fished another thousand times apart, yet he has twenty times the ironclad memories that I do. I can quote a lot of John Donne and James Dickey, and sing the patter songs of Gilbert and Sullivan and those Tull songs, but which rock where and when? I have to reinvent that wheel most every time. I long ago stopped doubting him and shut up and threw the tube.

How's your fishing memory? What happens to the attention that you pay? I fish the same nine-mile stretch of the Potomac about fifty times a year. I occasionally notice something new, but over the past decades at it I've marked and memorized just about every ledge and bar. I still have to work at where things happened, though, and I've organized the experience into some categories that help me behave differently.

Super Factors
Some factors remember themselves, or don't need remembering. I think of those as Super Factors. Good examples of a super factor are the stretch of river or the lake; the lure you are using; the season of the year. Obviously, if you flub a Super Factor you're going to be way off; but by the same token those factors are easily figured out independent of any previous experience. Put another way, there's not much loss in forgetting something you can easily figure out.

Grand Events are super factors and remember themselves. The Really Big Fish, the Really Huge Mistake, the Really Bad Thunderstorm, the Topless Tubers--those are experiences which become stories. They may be too grand to change your behavior and contribute to fishing success. For example, it took me four or five years to absorb the idea that February and March were the best times to catch big bass; the Really Big Bass I automatically remembered tended to come in April or even May, and February is, well, February. But when I look at my notes I see far more highly productive big-fish trips earlier and a goodly number of washouts, missed spawns, or wrong conditions in the Dogwood Months. Trip for trip March is the best month. Fact.

Big Factors
Big Factors are a different story. They're the things upon which fishing success is founded. They're specific, reliable, basic, and easy to forget. I think of big factors as these: Weather (temperature, light conditions, and barometer mainly; Date; Water temp; Water clarity; and Observations of Fish Behavior. These are the kind of things Butch remembers and I and other normal people can't. My advice: write down the Big Factors of every trip in conjunction with the kind of success you had.

Take water temperature. How are you going to remember that, other than writing it down? The difference between 39 and 41 can be huge; and whether it got warmer on the north or south bank can save a lot of running around. And the Conventional Wisdom--north bank is warmer--isn't always true when the Shenandoah enters, for example. Take some time, write it down.

Look at Where You've Been; Remember Where You're Going
This is a good rule for all navigation, including emotional and metaphysical. Once on a Canada fly-in I got lost in a maze of T-breaks in a mind-numbingly complicated lake. I couldn't remember if I'd cut through and turned twice or three times and--here's the point--none of the openings looked familiar. What I should have done was anticipate the problem and stop every time I came through into a new stem and look at it from the angle I'd be taking when I was heading back to camp. To do this, of course, the person has to realize that he's at a point that may later matter. I had time for one more dead-end before dark, and a mosquito-tortured night, when another member of my party came chugging blithely by and showed me the way home. I think it boils down to this: We handle two views of things far more accurately than we handle one.

Most anglers only get one view: where should I cast? Train yourself to add another view--upstream, downstream; channel or flat; morning or noon; spring or September. Stop and impress a second visual image of places on a regular basis, and those will cross-index to help you find your way to that spot again. This is especially good advice for those taking float trips on a strange stretch of water; take a moment to compose a picture of where your takeout is so you can find it in the dark, in the rain, on the fly, first time. I don't need to explain to you the trouble that comes with missing a takeout.

Take Extra Time
Pause a moment and reflect on things that are worth remembering. This is good advice for general living too; hey, maybe I should become a pop-philosopher and go on Oprah and get a personal trainer and a toll-free number. I know it often happens that a big fish or a good moment on the river tends to accelerate things; we always think we have to hustle to get another cast out, paddle back up to that ledge, and so on. I like to take a picture of my clients after they've released their big fish; I say, "Take a deep breath. Look at where the fish came from", then I snap it. You'd be amazed at how many people get a really happy look on their face when they pause in that moment. I wonder how many of us wasted that happy buzz in our haste to make it happen again. Put another way: how many people catch a bonza fish on the very last cast of a trip? Extra time to think will also cement in your mind the circumstances of the event, from which you can extract information later.

This also suggests a pause at the start; it's a tough time to stop and reflect. I'm always in a sweat to get fishing so it helps to mellow things out when we begin if we pause to take a water temp, consider the wind direction and the river level, measure the clarity of the water, put on some sunscreen, pour a cup of coffee, etc.

Keep A Journal
No brainer. I'm not good at it because I can't resist writing lengthy philosophical passages and then forgetting to include the water temp and the wind direction. It's usually enough to record the Big Factors, but a few impressions and anecdotes are worth it in the long run. Put your journal where you will find it; I keep mine in my dry box with the lunch stuff so I always find it at a point when I have a few minutes to jot things down. This results in a lot of information on mornings, but I also then generally can recall the evening that went with the previous morning and fill that in. Like all writing ideas, this is a matter of Routine. Good writers aren't particularly brainy or artistic; they're mainly just consistent. My grandfather kept a journal every day of his life, and it's mostly mundane data on weather and breakfast. For some reason it's fascinating.

Keeping a journal is like making Scotch; the first seven years are the toughest. You have to keep it up without any valuable output for a while, and if you try to use the output too soon it won't be very good. That's another good reason for keeping it short and simple. Obviously, springtime conditions aren't going to be much use in October, but by the next Spring they're going to be a tad more apropos. Of course, few Springs are the same so a few years may go by until the conditions repeat themselves usefully. And by then my memories of what happened when and what worked where have faded along with the names of my children and the location of my own butt.

If I could just find that journal.