How to Be More Confident When Fishing New Water

While my job puts me into the field and on the water more than say, being a plumber, it’s still a lot of time not spent in the woods and on the water. Add in a pair of 13-year-old girls who haven’t met an activity or organized sport they wouldn’t try, and the free time gets whittled down pretty quickly.

This was on my mind last week as I hauled my boat over to Northern Wisconsin. I knew I only had a couple of days at most to fish, and I really, really wanted to catch some bass. I also wanted to have a chance at a muskie, which is a species I’ve messed with from time to time but have only ever landed a handful after a lot of hours on the water.

With limited time and several lake options that I’d never been on in my life, I figured I should probably be as efficient as possible.

To make sure I was where I wanted to be, I pulled up onX Fish and went to work. This app allows you to do a lot of things, but what I needed was to filter through species on specific lakes to only focus on bodies of water that offered largemouth, smallmouth, and muskies. I didn’t want one or two of them where I spent my time, I wanted all of them.

I knew I’d be looking mostly for bass, but the prospect of a bonus muskie was important to me. There is just a little extra excitement to those first few casts of the day when you know you might catch a largemouth, or tie into a bronzeback, or just maybe, see a big wake build behind your buzzbait as a 45-inch apex predator of a fish decides whether it’s time to eat or not.

The first morning was a frog-fest, with plenty of largemouth to show, but not much else. The following morning, before the sun even touched the eastern horizon, I launched at a reservoir known largely for smallmouth, but also muskies. The smallies weren’t shy, and it was fun to work different rock piles, deep weed edges, and docks with enough water on them to hold a few bronzers.

While switching spots in the mid-morning, I spotted a weedy point that just looked good. Half a dozen casts into it, the first muskie hit. The fish, which was close enough to 40 inches to just call it that and not feel bad, crushed a buzzbait and put up a hell of a fight. It was my first muskie in years, and it didn’t feel like total luck.

Two days later, on a different lake, I had three follows and another 40-inch fish that committed to a buzzbait. All in the span of an hour, which in the world of muskies, is pretty surreal. The following day, for a change of pace, I fished a gin-clear lake that was just loaded with bass. I’d have never fished that lake, but a little research put me on something that made it too good to pass up.

While everyone wants giant fish, numbers of smaller fish can make for a pretty good day on the water, as well. The lakes that I fished in Wisconsin all had some data from creel surveys, which was a matter of a couple of clicks on the onX Fish app. Most of them showed decent numbers of bass, and gave a pretty good indicator of what the muskie situation would be like.

But one showed a couple hundred largemouth and smallmouth in creel surveys from two years ago. The size range was pretty decent, but that amount of fish is an outlier, and I wanted to see if it was true. It was, and while I never caught a fish that would have been much more than two pounds, I caught smallmouth and largemouth on topwaters of all varieties, swimbaits, ned rigs, and jerkbaits. It was so much fun that I’m going to bring my daughters over there to fish that lake specifically. Oh, and I saw a couple of muskies there, too.

This might sound crazy because you still have to make them bite, but you can almost à la carte fish these days with the right tools. Instead of spending all of your time on your home water, you can quickly figure out what nearby bodies of water feature the species you’re most interested in, what the average size is likely to be, population specifics, and even whether the boat ramp can handle your rig or not.

This isn’t appealing to everyone, and I get that. But my time in the northwoods messing with new fish in strange waters reignited something in me that I’ve somewhat lost over the years. Fishing new water is fun, and it only gets better when you have a lot of confidence in your day before you ever back the boat into the water.

After all, the belief we will catch fish is why we stick to familiar lakes and rivers. But there is something pretty special about having confidence you’ll catch something worth the effort, days or weeks, before you even see a body of water in person. And when it all comes together, whether that’s in the form of a limit of panfish bound for the fryer, or a three-and-a-half-foot long eating machine bending a topwater into submission, it really doesn’t get much better.