The top 10 fishing mistakes—and how to avoid them!

#9 DON’T EXPERIMENT

It takes an ingenious angler to devise a totally new technique to effectively catch fish. Take Dave Spaid, for example. He removed the spinner and beads from a crawler harness and replaced the hook with a bent Tru-Turn hook to make the nub of a worm corkscrew through the water. The walleye just couldn’t resist it. I remember chatting with Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Famer and walleye pro Gary Parsons about being schooled twice by Spaid and his then secret slow-death technique in the prestigious South Dakota Governor’s Cup.

Likewise, my buddies Doug Stange and Al Lindner were among the very first anglers to drop a white tube jig—intended for open-water bass fishing—down a hole in the ice for lake trout. When I first saw them work their tube-jig magic, I actually freaked out and fretted that the country’s laker populations would be in peril. It’s just that effective. The take away here? Never stop experimenting, because the best fishing techniques have yet to be invented.