How To Use Fishing Reports

Did you ever wonder why the fishing is almost never like the fishing reports say it is?

Fishing reports are a good source of information when they come from a reliable source. Even pros like KVD use reports. But you should never take any bass fishing report that's more than 1 hour old literally.

This is a lesson that took me years to learn. Today I'm going to help you learn this lesson much earlier than I did. I'm going to share a tip with you on how to use fishing reports to actually help you catch more fish.

In my early days of bass fishing, before a tournament or before just going out for some fun fishing, I would literally spend hours looking for and reading fishing reports 1 day or even several days before my trip. Slowly but surely I decided that everyone who gave a report was a liar and I started to realize that the reports were not helping me catch more fish. In fact, it seemed that I caught more fish when I didn't read the reports at all. Eventually I learned that the reason reports were not helping me catch more fish, was I was taking every report literally. If NC fishing reports said that they were biting plastic worms on points 2 days ago, I spent the whole day casting worms on points; whether I was catching fish or not.

Folks, bass fishing is a constantly changing game. This is a fact, because bass are a constantly changing query. Weather conditions, water conditions or any one of a thousand factors can and usually does change what bass are doing not only daily but even hourly. This is why fishing reports usually do not help you catch more fish.

So are reports useless? Absolutely not! reports are very helpful, You just have to change the way you interpret them. The correct way to use fishing reports, is to gather as many recent ones as possible, put them all together to form a big picture of what the bass are doing in general. Then take this information and use your common sense and experience to develop a pattern.

For example, if you're fishing in Michigan, gather as many Michigan fishing reports as you can find that pertain to not only the particular lake or waterway that you will be fishing, but for the entire area of the state. Then compare the reports and isolate the factors that all the reports have in common. As an example, if it's springtime, and most of the fishermen who are giving reports seem to be catching fish shallow, then this tells you that the spawn is probably in effect and that you probably should start looking for bass in shallow water. However keep in mind that if weather conditions have changed since the reports were written, the bass have likely adjusted to the changes and may have moved to deeper water.

Bass fishing reports should be used strictly as a method of determining what the bass are doing in general. Once you've determined this, you should then fine tune your search for fish based on the current conditions; which will likely be different from the conditions when the reports were written.