Pavlov’s dogs, fed for days at the sounding of a bell, began to salivate at the chime with no food in sensory range. Few witness that kind of conditioning, but perhaps you’ve seen a dog cower at the sound of newspaper being rolled up. Basically, that’s what smallmouths are doing around your boat.

Fishing pressure creates multifaceted problems for anglers. Harvest, always part of the equation unless regulations call for catch and release only, takes a toll. And no matter how careful catch-and-release anglers are, a certain percentage of hooked fish will die, so mortality is always a factor. Pressure culls the most aggressive specimens (the ones that grow heavy fast) out of the mix. Survivors become even more cautious. Conditioning occurs, wherein bass learn to avoid things that led to bad experiences in the past.

Conditioning is the hardest concept for some anglers to wrap their minds around. Fish may not be able to qualify what’s real with the sophistication of a human, but it’s equally true that we tend to underestimate the abilities of fish. Consider what we’ve learned in the past 20 years.

With respect to describing fish behavior, the word “instinct” (which basically means “I don’t know”) has become increasingly passé, replaced by terms and descriptions that define animals with some cognitive ability. Biologists now believe bass use day length to time migrations. Walleyes and bass successfully navigate to frequently used areas, over distances that cover miles, suspended, with no shoreline or structure in sight. Laboratory scientists have determined bass can distinguish between identical targets, learning quickly to strike the one that releases food and learning just as quickly to avoid the one that gives them a mild electric shock.

It would be indefensible to maintain bass can’t learn. If bass can learn to avoid electric shock, they can learn to avoid other things that cause them discomfort, pain, or stress. Professional bass anglers discuss “conditioning” all the time, typically focusing on how bass can learn to avoid lure types used by the majority of anglers on any given body of water. But that’s just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

The Effects of Pressure on Smallmouths
Frank Campbell has been guiding people to giant smallmouths on Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, and the Niagara River for 17 years. “The most dramatic change in the fishing over that time period involves the education of fish,” he says. “Smallmouths are forcing us to look for new and innovative methods they haven’t seen. We have a lot more players in the game these days. When I first started, you had guys out there, but on an average day you may have seen 6 boats. Now you’re seeing 20 boats chasing smallmouths on that average day.

Anglers are better educated than they were 20 years ago, with more television shows, more websites, and more information available. Twenty years ago, those other guys weren’t catching the fish you were. Now they’re sticking good fish, too. Then all you needed was a couple bags of tubes. Now, you may have a hard time catching any number of them on tubes. Then, you had guys fishing shoreline spots. Now, with better electronics, guys are finding key offshore spots in one day, the same spots that took me 10 years to find.”

It’s an old story, and fishermen like Campbell adapt to pressure (as explained later). But adaptation can’t overcome all aspects of pressure.

As a former resource manager, In-Fisherman Field Editor Gord Pyzer has studied some of the fallout from fishing pressure. “I was fortunate enough to work for the Ministry of Natural Resources and to live on Lake of the Woods for 32 years,” he says. “In the late 1970s smallmouth bass were flying under everybody’s radar. Any fish without a white dot on its tail was thrown back. So, if you were fortunate enough to be a bass angler, it was common to catch 40 to 75 quality fish almost any time after the prespawn wave of bass moved shallow into this particular bay.”

Pyzer says he recommended that bay as the site for an ongoing study on spawning behavior, based on the work of Dr. Mark Ridgway. “I went snorkeling with the biologists, helping them tag fish,” Pyzer recalls. “Every 6 feet, all around us, big smallmouths were sitting on nests. It was an amazing thing to see.”

Many bass were marked with floy tags, and many were implanted with radio tags that allowed tracking for over 3 years. “Over that 3-year period, interest in smallmouth fishing exploded exponentially, and so did the pressure,” Pyzer says. “Today in that same spawning bay, which is one of the most classic smallmouth sites on the lake, you probably won’t catch a single bass during most trips through it, even during the best spring weather in prime conditions.

“The problem, of course, as written about so often in In-Fisherman, is that these smallmouth belong to the group that stays put. They’re crawfish feeders and they home to specific ranges in the spring, summer, fall, and winter. They do not move or wander. In fact, we initially thought many of the bass had died after we tagged them because they moved so little, often less than 100 yards over a week or two. The site offered so much food in the form of crayfish, they did not have to expend any energy. Unfortunately, that characteristic worked against them, because stay-at-home smallies will not move, no matter how much pressure you put on them.

“And while I’m certain that some of the fish have become educated and conditioned, the more salient fact remains: There are simply far fewer bass in that bay today as a result of fishing pressure, and the ones that remain are much smaller. It’s almost identical to what happened on Lac Seul when word leaked about muskies. In less than 6 years, creel data revealed it was taking anglers twice as long to catch a muskie half the size.

“Stay-at-home populations of smallmouth bass are much more vulnerable to fishing pressure than the smallmouth populations that follow openwater pelagic baitfish. Those populations are here today, gone tomorrow, and better able to stand up to the pressure that inevitably builds and follows.”

Your Negative Cues
One of the jobs that helped me pay for college was roofing. We wore heavy clothes on a surface three times hotter than the surrounding air, which was generally quite hot. Even with gloves, ripping up old roofing wore the skin from our hands. Engulfed in noxious fumes, we carted bubbling buckets of black tar to spread across the roof with mops. We drank extraordinary amounts of liquid to stave off heat prostration, similar to what soldiers in Iraq do on an average day.

When the smell of hot tar comes wafting down from a roofing project, I start feeling nauseous. Even today, 30 years later, I associate the smell of tar with sunstroke—which prompts me to wonder, when I hook and release a smallmouth, what are all the things it might associate with that experience?

When considering factors that lead to conditioning, thinking only about lure type, size, and color is a mistake. Just before being hooked, smallmouths often hear the gradual approach of an electric motor, the incessant clicking of a sonar unit, the shuffling of feet on a deck, and the sound of waves slapping a hull. Before the lure even hits the water (yet another sonic opportunity for negative association), fish have the opportunity to make any number of connections between you and a prior bad experience. Electricity from wiring grounded to the hull; your shadow; the shadow of the boat; the flash of a white shirt; the sound of an anchor crashing to the bottom—these are just some of the negative cues that can limit your chances before you make a single cast.

None of this may be at all true for small or untutored bass, but what about big fish in heavily pressured waters? Logic insists the gambler in that case is the angler who rushes up to a targeted area, rips the trolling motor into the water, and leaves the dashboard sonar running while he arcs a long cast, terminating in a big, noisy “kasploosh.” The problem gambler is the guy who crowds other boats on heavily fished waters, suggesting the only thing worse than the click from two transducers is the din from four.

Turning the Tables
Campbell responds to pressure by taking the road less traveled. “Now I look for spots that aren’t on the maps,” he says. “We’re fishing a lot of areas where, 17 years ago, I spent no time. Now we’re looking at spots from a different perspective, thinking outside the box. When I pass over a hump I can’t find on my best charts, I start salivating. Little turns, drop-offs, isolated ridges—anything that could be overlooked gets my attention these days.”

Smallmouths either get driven to these nondescript spots by pressure, or they were always there and we never knew because the habitat seemed bland and featureless. That’s the key. The blander, the better. Surrounded by hectares of flat, featureless sand or clay, smallmouths find food where they won’t be bothered by anglers. A small scattering of rocks in the middle of a huge sand flat can be all it takes to attract a dozen or more big smallmouths.

The same kind of logic rules lure selection for conditioned bass. “Smallmouths have seen tubes every day for years, and a few years back it was very hard to catch a smallmouth on a tube,” Campbell says. “Right now it’s Berkley Gulp! minnows and gobies that are on fire, because both the look and scent are still new to the fish.”

When smallmouths finally catch on to the new thing, experimentation starts over. It’s a natural process, and we constantly detail new lures and techniques designed to negate the effects of pressure in the pages of this magazine, such as learning to fish plastics “in space,” far from the boat. And, generally, the more pressure bass experience, the more important subtle colors become. Smoke and green pumpkin stock rises, overtaking fluorescent shades and metal flake. But the first rule for combating pressure is to make yourself small.

“All those boats are putting off fish, so I’m staying way off spots and casting to them,” Campbell says. “We catch more smallmouths by drifting with the wind, too. We’re letting a ton of line out, so the boat’s not shadowing the fish, and just letting baits tap or waft along behind us.

“Pressured bass can be line-shy,” he adds. “If you’re the only one there, you can use heavier line. When lots of people are around, you’d better start downsizing to lighter line, smaller swivels, smaller sinkers, and smaller baits. When you’re using 6-pound and other guys are using 8, the improvement in the bite becomes noticeable in pressure situations.”

Try an experiment the next time you spend any number of days on heavily pressured water in stable conditions: Fish a spot the way you normally do the first day. The second day, use lighter line and make longer casts. Wear camo, dull blue, or green hats and shirts. Once you determine distance and direction from your spot, line it up and turn off everything electronic on the boat. Let the wind take the boat in for the last 150 feet or so. Slowly lower the anchor and carefully place it on bottom. Stop the boat a long cast from the targeted area.

Sit down. Relax. Let the fish adjust to the sound of waves slapping the hull. Don’t stomp around. Reduce all boat noise to a whisper. Reduce all movement to a minimum. Keep the rod low when casting. Stop the lure less than a foot over the water. Don’t be like Ike when you hook one.

Underestimating the capacities of animals seems endemic to western thought, leading to sounds of awe and wonder from CNN reporters when scientists say animals can predict tsunamis, or that gorillas, crows, and various other animals can recognize themselves in a mirror, proving they have a sense of self (something science denied them for centuries).

You’ve run afoul of pressure, or you wouldn’t be reading this. Where bass are pressured, the game gets harder every year. To continue playing you have to be able to think outside the box that teachers, parents, peers, even scientists, and people you’ve never met wrapped you up in long ago. Don’t underestimate fish. Respect (and release) the quarry. Everything works better that way. ■