Why Slow Anglers Always Win

All right, what's going on? My name is Kyle Welcher. I appreciate y'all checking back on the channel. If you're new to the channel, welcome. I appreciate you stopping by. A lot of y'all who are not new to the channel, though, y'all are gonna know and be familiar with kind of the style and the patterns and kind of just the overall concept through which I fish these tournaments and which I'm fun fishing and stuff like that also. So today we're just gonna kind of go through the differences in running and gunning, which is, self-admittedly, what I do. A lot of times, what I do way too much. So a lot of times I feel like I run and gun a ton. I'm trying to find those fish that are set up, that are feeding, I can catch them as fast as possible and I can catch as many of them as possible. Now, there's obviously times where you should stay put whenever you find an above average area or you find an area that has a population of fish, especially one that has the potential of winning one of these big tournaments, like I fished the Bassmaster Elite Series, and it's more times than not, the tournament is won out of one or two areas, and there's almost always a day where the guy has to go scrambling, but for the most part, the tournaments are won off of one area, one spot, one little creek, I mean, one tree, one dock, whatever it is, there's almost always something like that that you hear about where the dude stayed put and he really caught them and really made it happen. Now, for me, the reason I run and gun so fast, I feel like I lose confidence faster than any other fisherman. That's not confidence in myself or my abilities, that's only confidence in exactly what I'm fishing and the bait that I'm fishing. If I fish for 15 or 20 minutes and I haven't had a bite, I haven't culled, I haven't changed spots or something like that, guess what? I'm about to make a change. I'm not the type of guy that pulls up on a random bank or something and fishes down through it and didn't get a bite and gonna turn around and go back down through it with a different bait. I'm not gonna do that. I leave four, eight, 12, sometimes 20 rods laying on the front deck and I have a certain scenario or a specific application for every single rod. So whenever I get to a lay down piece of pole timber or something like that, I'm gonna flip a jig to it. When I get to something that's a lot more matted or thicker, I'm gonna flip a D-bomb in it. Whenever I get to some shallow pea gravelly or shallow bluff, I'm gonna throw a square bill bite. I'm gonna throw a little John MD to something like that that's an eight foot. That's just kind of what I do. I have a system for the baits that I throw. So I run and gun and I cover a ton of water and I cover that water with the bait that for me makes the most sense in that application. Now what that does, that's gonna do a couple of things. Number one, it's gonna make you a more efficient angler. It's gonna make you a more consistent angler, but sometimes you'll fish over the fish. That's just the truth of it. Like I know that sometimes I fish over fish, but I feel like throughout the course of a day, I'm gonna put my bait in front of five aggressive fish and I'm gonna be able to catch them. And a lot of times, the style that I like to fish does generate some big bites. Now when would I say that's the wrong approach? A couple of times. Number one, lakes that have history. Like Guntersville, there's a lot of lakes in the country, St. Johns River, all of Okeechobee. There are certain places on Okeechobee, on Guntersville, on St. Johns, where the big ones just continuously get. So if you're fishing there in the pre-spawn or around the spawn or even in the post-spawn, where the post-spawn a little bit less, unless you're fishing more offshore, but in the pre-spawn where the fish are moving up shallow and they're coming to you, it is one of the worst things you can do to run around because a lot of times you have fish coming to you. So if you got a place on Guntersville that there's like eight or 10 places where it typically gets one and you decide to fish in one of those places, well, if you can run around and run a bunch of good looking stuff, but those places don't have the potential to have 30 pounds swimming to it every day like a lot of those historic places do. So if you're gonna fish somewhere like Guntersville in March or anytime there's some type of a migration, you're gonna wanna stay put, find an area where it has the potential for the big fish to keep coming to you. And that's when you're gonna wanna kinda cycle through baits, cycle through areas, expand a little bit, go a little bit shallower, go a little bit deeper, go to a little bit different types of color, of cover or anything like that. That's whenever it's the most important to stay put. A lot of times, whenever you're fishing a lake that fishes a little bit smaller, like this year we're going to Pickwick June the 2nd. Pickwick doesn't fish that big offshore. It just doesn't. There's not that much structure offshore. Now obviously, there is a lot. But when you've got 80, 90, 100 guys out there rotating on the same stuff all day long, sometimes the best thing you can do is stay put if you're on an area that has a school that the fish are firing or the fish are biting and you feel like you can catch enough to have a decent day or a good day. If you stay put, a lot of times it's better not to move around a lot. Because if you leave one of your spots and you run to another ledge and a boat just left, you could get in a bad rotation. And you could hit seven, eight, nine, you could hit 20 or 25 places in a row that another boat has just hit them or already hit them today. So you can get in a bad rotation. So a lot of times on those lakes that fish a little bit smaller, Pickwick is not a small lake, but it will fish a little bit smaller. It did this time and the water was full for half the tournament. It was super low for half of the tournament also. But that lake is gonna fish small. It's gonna be really important to stay put. Now, when is it more important to fish fast? Well, if you go to a lake like, well, any lake, whenever it is, late summer, post-spawn, even in the winter, a lot of people don't think about fishing fast in the winter. But anytime the fish are kind of where they're gonna be for a little bit of time, like if they're all up spawning, I feel like you're gonna do a little bit better unless you're in a super good area going a little bit faster and increasing your odds of coming past a bigger one that's a little bit more aggressive. So whenever the fish are up there and they're kind of stationary, you know, like middle of summer, the fish is two or three months until fall or a long time until fall and we're a long time away from the spawn, those fish are kind of gonna be where they're gonna be for a long time. And a lot of times it's about pulling up and catching the couple that are active and then moving on to some other ones because it's not really advantageous to sit there and hope that one of them gets aggressive if there's not more fish coming to exactly what you're fishing. Now, I can't help it. I love to fish fast. That's what I wanna do. I like throwing braided line. I like throwing a swim jig. Don't get too good of a look at this one though because this is a prototype from Muntane. I like throwing braid, big rods. I like to move down the bank and go as fast as I possibly can go. So for me, I don't wanna go slow. But people have been telling me for like ever, for as long as I've been fishing, everybody's been telling me I fish too fast and I go too fast and I run around too much. I like doing it. It's fun for me. Now, Hunter doesn't. Hunter tells me to go faster. I tell you to leave. Yeah, Hunter tells me to go faster. But anyways, that's kind of my breakdown on why I fish so fast, why I run and gun so much. And obviously there's guys who have made an awesome living, won a ton of tournaments, even this year, you know, where people have won tournaments, just kind of milking one spot. So I'm not saying there's anything wrong with either one. I'm just kind of breaking down what I think would be the optimized approach to bass fishing of going both ways. So basically for me, that's kind of my thoughts on it. If y'all agree to that, if y'all fish the way that I fish, or y'all a little bit more slower and methodical and you like to really milk an area and go through it with a couple of baits, leave me a comment down below. Let me know if you've got an application where you've been over a spot, you know, and you were throwing a crankbait or something like that and you turned around and picked up a shaky head and absolutely crushed them. Let me know, because I want to know what exactly it takes to trigger the fish, because I know I do fish over some sometimes. There's just no way around it. So if y'all enjoyed that, I appreciate it. We're going to be making more of these videos in the fall. We're really trying to ramp it up. Got a little bit burnt out on filming this year, but we're back now, fishing a lot, filming a lot. Hope y'all enjoyed that video. If you did, hit the subscribe button and let me know y'all's thoughts on the topic down below. And we'll see you on the next one. Appreciate it.