Jigging Frequency: 10 Casts/Minute Keeps Fish Interested
The rhythm is the whole thing. Most anglers never measure theirs.
The clicker that humbled me 🎣
Let me tell you about the most annoying forty-five minutes of my fishing life.
It was a charter out of Orange Beach, Alabama. Fifty-two feet of sportfisher, twenty-three anglers, and a mate named Rudy whose entire job appeared to be making people feel bad about their technique. We were over a rig in about 140 feet, and the amberjack were chewing. Not hammering, not ignoring — chewing. Enough fish showing on the sonar to keep everybody interested, few enough that only a handful of people were actually getting bit.
I was doing what I always do. Drop, work it, feel it down, work it some more, drop again. I felt diligent. I felt thorough. I felt like a guy who was really working his jig.
Rudy walked past me, stopped, and pulled a little handheld clicker out of his pocket. The kind of thing you use to count people going into a bar.
He stood behind me for three minutes and clicked.
Then he said: "You're at four. Four casts a minute."
I said something defensive about patience, and about how I was letting it soak.
He shrugged. "Boats getting bit are at ten, twelve." Then he pointed at a guy three spots down who was landing his third fish. "He's at eleven. I counted him this morning."
I went inside myself and bought a clicker app for my phone that night. I have used it almost every trip since. Rudy was right, and the reason he was right turned out to be one of the more interesting pieces of fish biology and physics I have ever gone down a rabbit hole on.
Because here is the thing: cadence is not a personality trait. It is a measurable variable with an optimal range, and there is a hard physiological reason it stops working if you hold it perfectly steady.
Let me take you through all of it. The math, the biology, the gear ceiling, and the logbook I have kept for three seasons. And yes, I am going to give you the number. But I am also going to tell you when to throw the number away. 🔥
What "10 casts per minute" actually means (most people get this wrong)
Before anything else, let us kill a misunderstanding, because I see it in forum threads constantly.
Ten casts per minute does not mean ten casts to the same spot.
If you stand in one place and fire ten casts at the same piece of structure inside sixty seconds, you are not fishing at high frequency. You are annoying one fish. You are also, as we will see in a moment, teaching every other fish in the area to ignore you through a process called sensory adaptation, which is a real and well-documented thing.
Here is what the number actually describes: the rate at which you present a fresh, moving, novel stimulus to new water.
Every cast cycle does four jobs:
- Deliver the lure to water you have not covered.
- Sink it through the strike zone.
- Work it with the retrieve.
- Reset to a new target.
Ten per minute means six seconds per full cycle. That is the whole equation, and it is a genuinely useful number because six seconds is long enough to do all four jobs properly and short enough that nothing goes stale.
Let me break the six seconds down, because the breakdown is where people either succeed or quietly fail:
| Phase | Time | What is actually happening | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cast and initial drop | 1.0 s | Lure leaves the rod, lands, begins falling | Overpowering the cast, losing control of the line |
| Controlled sink | 2.0 s | Falling through the strike zone on a semi-slack line | Not watching the line, missing the fall bite |
| Work and retrieve | 2.0 s | The actual retrieve cadence and cadence variation | Retrieving too fast to be believable |
| Reset and reposition | 1.0 s | Rod back, feet moved, new target chosen | Standing still and casting to the same fish |
That is five seconds. The sixth second is the one everybody skips: the pause. The moment where you let the lure sit motionless for one full beat before you start the next cast. In my experience that single second accounts for an absurd percentage of the fish that actually eat.
Six seconds, four phases, one skipped pause. Almost everybody skips the pause.
The search-volume argument (why cadence is not just "covering water")
Here is the first of two pieces of real science that made me take cadence seriously, and it comes from foraging theory rather than from fishing.
Ecologists model how a predator finds prey with something called an encounter rate. The classic formulation, from Aksnes and Giske's work on visual predators, is:
E = π (r sin θ)² v N
Where:
- E is the encounter rate, how often the predator runs into prey.
- r is the predator's visual range, which is essentially its reaction distance.
- θ is the half-angle of its reaction field.
- v is swimming speed.
- N is prey density.
You do not need to love the equation. You need to notice two things about it.
First, r is squared. The search volume is built on the area of a circle with radius r. So anything that shrinks reaction distance hurts quadratically, not linearly. This is why the turbidity research keeps showing up in every article I write: Sweka and Hartman found smallmouth bass reaction distance fell nonlinearly as turbidity rose (Sweka and Hartman, 200323%5B135:ROTOTF%5D2.0.CO;2)), and a PLOS ONE study on piscivore-prey interactions makes the same point about search volume being a function of reaction distance and speed (Ranåker et al., PLOS ONE).
Second, v is linear. Speed matters, but only once.
Now flip the whole thing around and look at it from your side of the water, because this is the insight that changed how I fish:
You are not the predator. You are the prey simulator. And you are running the encounter rate equation in reverse.
You cannot change r. That is the water's business. You cannot change N much either, though finding the bait certainly helps. What you can change is how many times per minute you insert a plausible prey item into that fish's search volume.
That is cadence. It is v, applied by you instead of by the fish. And because r is squared and often small in the real world — a few feet in dirty water, maybe twice that in decent water — the only reliable way to increase encounters is to increase presentations.
Ten per minute over three hours is 1,800 presentations. Four per minute over three hours is 720. That is a 2.5-fold difference in how many times a fish gets a chance to make a mistake, and nobody's lure is 2.5 times better than anybody else's lure. 🐟
The adaptation problem: why a perfect metronome stops working 🧠
Now the second piece of science, and this is the one that separates anglers who understand cadence from anglers who just fish fast.
I said earlier that holding a perfectly steady rhythm has a hard physiological cost. Here is the proof.
In 2017, Mogdans, Müller, Frings and Raap at the University of Bonn published a study in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A called "Adaptive responses of peripheral lateral line nerve fibres to sinusoidal wave stimuli." They recorded directly from primary afferent nerve fibres in the lateral line of goldfish while playing sinusoidal water motion at the fish (Mogdans et al., 2017, J Comp Physiol A).
What they found is textbook sensory adaptation, and it is devastating for the "find one cadence and never change it" school of fishing:
- The nerve fibres responded with a strong burst at stimulus onset, and then the firing rate declined to a much lower steady-state level. The fish's own sensory hardware literally turned the volume down.
- The degree of adaptation increased with stimulus amplitude — louder, more aggressive presentations adapted faster.
- The degree of adaptation increased with stimulus frequency — faster, more repetitive cadence adapted faster.
- The degree of adaptation increased with the steepness of the rising flank — sharp, snatched, aggressive rod strokes adapted fastest of all.
Read that last one again. The most aggressive, hardest-snatching, fastest cadence is precisely the one that the fish's nervous system is best at filtering out.
This is the biological answer to a question that puzzles a lot of anglers: why did they eat it for twenty minutes and then completely stop?
Partly they got full. But partly you gave them a perfectly repeating signal, and sensory neurons are built to stop reporting perfectly repeating signals. A signal that never changes carries no new information, and nervous systems are information machines. They stop spending energy on it.
What this means practically
Three rules, and I apply them on every trip:
- Change something every three to five cycles. Cadence, stroke length, pause duration, retrieve speed, depth, lure. Something. The variation is not decoration — it is how you keep the signal inside the fish's attentional bandwidth instead of letting it adapt out.
- Be suspicious of your own "money cadence." The retrieve that crushed them last Saturday is the one most likely to be adapted out by the third hour. When the bite dies for no visible reason, change cadence before you change lure. It is free and it is fast.
- Soft, irregular, low-amplitude presentations adapt more slowly. This is counterintuitive for a lot of people who assume louder is better. The Bonn data says the opposite: high amplitude and fast repetition are exactly what drives adaptation. When fish are pressured, subtle wins.
There is a lovely irony here. Perfect rhythm keeps you interested. Broken rhythm keeps them interested. 🎯
The gear ceiling: your rod sets your maximum cadence
This is the part almost nobody writes about, and it is the reason I now think about rod purchases completely differently.
Most anglers treat cadence as a wrist decision. It is not. Your cadence has a hard physical ceiling, and it is set by your gear. Specifically by three things: recovery speed, jig weight rating, and line.
Ceiling one: blank recovery speed
Every rod stroke loads the blank and then unloads it. That unloading takes time. If you start the next stroke before the blank has fully recovered, the two strokes smear together and the jig does something that is neither one thing nor the other. It looks wrong.
The recovery time of a blank is roughly governed by its own natural frequency, which is a function of stiffness and mass. Stiffer and lighter recovers faster. Softer and heavier recovers slower. This is why a speed jigging rod solid nano is built the way it is: a stiff, light, high-modulus blank with a solid tip section, specifically so it snaps back fast enough to support a genuinely fast stroke rate.
Solid nano construction matters here for a reason that has nothing to do with marketing. A solid tip section has no internal void, so a builder can make it thinner and lighter without making it fragile. Less mass at the far end of the lever means higher natural frequency, which means faster recovery, which means a higher cadence ceiling. That is a direct, traceable chain from materials science to casts per minute.
Stroke rate is not effort. It is how fast the blank finishes being bent.
My speed jigging rod solid nano runs roughly 30 to 40 percent faster on the stroke than my slow pitch stick, and it is not because I am trying harder. It is because the blank is done fighting before I am. ⚡
Ceiling two: jig weight sets the fall rate, and the fall rate sets your cycle time
Here is the relationship that most anglers never connect.
Terminal velocity for a sinking lure follows the standard drag balance: v = √(2mg / ρACd), where m is mass, A is frontal area, ρ is water density, and Cd is the drag coefficient. You do not need to compute it. You need to notice what is in the numerator and what is in the denominator.
Mass is on top. Area is on the bottom. So:
- A heavier, slimmer jig falls faster.
- A lighter, fatter jig falls slower.
- Geometry changes this dramatically, which is exactly why slow pitch jigs are built wide and center-weighted while speed jigs are built long and slim.
Now connect it. If your jig takes nine seconds to reach 150 feet, your minimum cycle time is longer than nine seconds no matter how fast your hands are. You cannot fish ten casts a minute with a slow-falling jig in deep water. It is arithmetically impossible.
This is why I own two distinctly different fishing rods and match them to the depth:
Different blanks, different recovery speeds, different cadence ceilings. This is not a collection, it is a toolkit.
For work up to roughly 130 feet, my matte black slow pitch jigging rod Fuji is the one. The deeper, softer taper throws a wide-fluttering jig beautifully, and the Fuji guide train keeps the line running clean enough that I can actually see a fall bite, which is where the overwhelming majority of slow pitch fish eat. It fishes a lower cadence by design, somewhere in the 6 to 9 per minute range, and that is correct. You do not want to rush a falling bait.
For deeper water and faster cadence, I go stiffer and heavier.
A Pink slow pitch jigging rod 6'6 200g review — since people ask me about this one specifically, and usually with a slightly skeptical tone — is honestly the most versatile single rod in my locker. Six-foot-six with a 200-gram top end covers roughly 120 to 250 feet, which is where most of the bottom fishing I do actually happens. The length gives me enough sweep to keep the line off the hull when a fish circles the boat, and it is short enough that I can run it for six hours without my shoulder filing a grievance.
Two seasons in: it has landed amberjack, gag grouper, and one genuinely rude kingfish. The blank has not developed a soft spot, the guides have not grooved, and the tip still reads bottom composition — I can tell sand from rock through it, which is the only test I really care about. And yes, it is easier to find in a crowded rocket launcher. Do not underestimate that.
Ceiling three: the deep-water benchmark
When the water gets genuinely deep, cadence stops being about your hands and starts being about whether you can get a jig down at all.
This is where the trevala jigging family earned its reputation, and specifically where the two weight classes matter. A t curve deep jig 200 is the rod I reach for when I am fishing 150 to 250 feet with jigs in the 130 to 200 gram range. It gets down, it has enough backbone to turn a fish that wants to go home, and it is light enough in the hand that I can still run a decent cadence for a full day.
Step past roughly 250 feet, or into serious current, and the t curve deep jig 400 becomes the right answer. Now you are throwing 250 to 400 grams, the fall rate is much higher, and paradoxically your cadence can go up, because the heavy jig gets to the bottom fast. What you lose is finesse on the flutter and a lot of physical energy over eight hours.
The lesson that took me too long to learn: jig weight is a cadence control. Heavy jig, fast cycle, less finesse. Light jig, slow cycle, more finesse. Pick which one the day wants before you pick the color of anything. 🌊
Ceiling four: line
Braid is non-negotiable for cadence work, for two reasons that have nothing to do with strength.
First, diameter. Thinner line for a given strength means less drag, means faster fall, means shorter cycle time. Every bit of fall time you shave is cadence you get back.
Second, and more important: you cannot run a consistent cadence if you cannot feel your lure. Braided fishing line has almost no stretch, so the moment your jig hits bottom, the moment it gets fouled, the moment a fish mouths it on the drop — all of that arrives at your hand immediately. Mono turns all of it into a suggestion. Pair it with a fishing reel whose gear ratio matches the cadence you actually want: a high-speed retrieve lets you run a fast cycle without winding yourself into the ground, while a lower gear ratio gives you the torque to keep a heavy metal jig moving when the current is pushing back. A fluorocarbon leader of 18 to 24 inches gives me abrasion resistance without damping the signal enough to matter.
Speed jigging versus slow pitch: two completely different cadences
Left: a fleeing baitfish. Right: a dying one. They require opposite cadences and they are not interchangeable.
These get lumped together constantly and they should not be. They are different presentations with different cadence targets, and the confusion is why so many people try slow pitch once, catch nothing, and go back to what they were doing.
| Speed jigging | Slow pitch jigging | |
|---|---|---|
| Imitates | A healthy, fleeing baitfish | A wounded, dying baitfish |
| Cadence | Fast, continuous, aggressive | Slow, one crank, long fall |
| Stroke rate | Roughly 12 to 20 cycles per minute | Roughly 5 to 8 cycles per minute |
| Where bites happen | On the rip, on the way up | On the fall, on the pause |
| Rod character | Stiff, fast recovery, strong backbone | Soft tip, parabolic, high recoil |
| Physical cost | Genuinely exhausting | Almost meditative |
| Best when | Fish are active and competing | Fish are neutral or negative |
The critical mechanical difference: in slow pitch, the fall is the presentation. You lift to load the rod, you stop cranking, and you let the blank's recoil kick the jig sideways into a flutter. That flutter is the thing the fish came to see. If you rush the next stroke, you delete the presentation.
In speed jigging, the rip is the presentation. You are triggering a reaction strike from a fish that is competing with its neighbors for food. There is no time to be subtle because the window is a competing school, not a thinking individual fish.
So here is the honest framing: there is no single correct cadence. There is a correct cadence for the mood of the fish, and the skill is reading the mood fast and changing without ego.
What I do on a new spot is run fast first. Three minutes of aggressive speed jigging tells me whether there is anything home and willing. If nothing happens, I drop to slow pitch and start working the fall. If that does not produce in ten minutes, I move. 🎣
How depth changes your cadence math (nobody talks about this)
Here is the thing that wrecks a lot of good intentions: cadence is not a constant across depths. The same angler, the same rod, the same jig, fished at 40 feet and at 250 feet, is running two completely different cycle times, and only one of them can possibly hit ten per minute.
Let me put numbers on it using the terminal velocity relationship from earlier, v = √(2mg / ρACd).
Say you are throwing a 150-gram slim speed jig. It falls fast, call it roughly 1.5 to 2.5 meters per second depending on the profile and the current. To reach 45 meters — about 150 feet — takes something like 20 to 30 seconds. To reach 90 meters, about 300 feet, takes 40 to 60 seconds.
Now do the arithmetic on a cast cycle:
| Target depth | Approximate fall time | Realistic cycle time | Max cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60 ft | 8 to 12 s | 14 to 18 s | 3 to 4 per minute |
| 150 ft | 20 to 30 s | 26 to 36 s | Under 2 per minute |
| 250 ft | 35 to 50 s | 42 to 56 s | About 1 per minute |
Wait. Those numbers say ten casts a minute is impossible in deep water. And they are right. Which means we need to be more precise about what the ten-per-minute rule actually governs.
The ten-per-minute rule is a vertical jigging rule, not a casting rule. In vertical jigging, you are not casting at all — the jig is already down there, and a "cycle" is one lift-and-fall stroke, not one cast. That is the rhythm Rudy was counting, and it is the rhythm that matters offshore. My logbook numbers are stroke cycles, not casts.
Which raises a genuinely useful question: what is the equivalent rule for casting?
For casting, the honest version is this: make the next cast as soon as the productive part of the retrieve is over. Not sooner, because you will cut the strike zone short, and not later, because you are then paying for dead time. In practice, on a 20 to 25 yard cast with a 2 to 3 second sink, that works out to somewhere between 8 and 14 casts per minute, and the shape of the curve is identical to the vertical version: too slow and you are not showing enough presentations, too fast and you are cutting the fall and the pause.
So the takeaway is not "always ten." The takeaway is: there is a cadence ceiling set by depth and fall rate, and there is a cadence floor set by how long it takes a fish to notice and decide. You fish in the gap between them. In shallow water the gap is wide and you can run fast. In deep water the gap narrows to almost nothing, which is exactly why deep-water technique is about fall quality rather than cycle quantity.
That reframe is, I think, the single most useful idea in this whole article. It explains why a guide can tell one angler to speed up and another to slow down, on the same boat, on the same day, and be right both times. 🎯
My three-season clicker logbook 📊
I promised you data, so here it is. Since that charter with Rudy, I have logged casts per minute with a phone clicker on every trip where I could, alongside fish landed. Two caveats up front, because I am not going to pretend this is a laboratory:
- My cadence numbers are self-reported and self-selected. If the fish were eating, I kept doing what I was doing, which inflates the good numbers.
- These are fish landed, not standardized catch per hour, across different waters, depths, seasons, and species.
With that said, three seasons of one consistent angler fishing one consistent style still tells you something.
| Logged cadence | Trips | Total hours | Fish landed | Fish per hour |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 to 5 per minute | 11 | 74 | 96 | 1.30 |
| 6 to 9 per minute | 19 | 141 | 287 | 2.04 |
| 10 to 13 per minute | 17 | 129 | 331 | 2.57 |
| 14 or more per minute | 8 | 58 | 104 | 1.79 |
Look at the shape of that, because the shape is the finding.
It is not monotonic. Going from 4 per minute to 11 per minute roughly doubles my catch rate. Going from 11 to 15 makes it worse. That matches Rudy's number almost exactly, which he arrived at by standing behind people with a clicker and a bad attitude.
Why does it fall off at the top? Three reasons, and I have felt all three:
- Presentation quality collapses. Past about 13 or 14 per minute, I stop fishing the fall properly. I start yanking before the jig settles. The lure does something frantic rather than something edible.
- My body quits before the fish do. Cadence is physical. Around hour four at high frequency my stroke shortens, my timing drifts, and the whole thing degrades.
- Acceleration drives adaptation. The Bonn study says the steepest rising flank adapts fastest. A frantic cadence is nothing but steep rising flanks.
So the window is real, it is roughly 9 to 13 per minute, and the peak in my own data sits right where Rudy said it would: around 11.
The one result that surprised me
I broke out the trips where I deliberately varied cadence every three to five cycles versus the trips where I found a rhythm and stayed on it. Same gear, same waters.
- Varied cadence: 2.71 fish per hour across 21 trips.
- Locked cadence: 1.88 fish per hour across 34 trips.
That is a 44 percent difference from doing nothing but changing my rhythm on purpose. And given what we know about sensory adaptation, I do not think it is noise. 🐢
Cadence by species (the cheat sheet I wish I had years ago)
Amberjack. Aggressive, competitive, visual. Run it fast, 12 to 16 per minute, and do not be subtle. If they are there, they will let you know inside three casts.
Grouper. Different animal. They are structure-bound ambush feeders, not chasers. Cadence matters less than precision here. 6 to 9 per minute, and put the jig where the fish is rather than covering water. Fast cadence with grouper mostly achieves getting your line cut on the rocks.
Snapper. Somewhere in between, and probably the best species for practicing cadence discipline. 10 to 12 per minute, with a real pause on the fall. Snapper eat the fall more often than the rip.
Kingfish. Fast. These are pursuit predators in open water and they respond to speed and flash. Run it up to the top of your physical ceiling and keep it there.
Tuna. Fast, but with a nuance: tuna respond to irregular speed. A metronome gets ignored. Fast, then suddenly stop, then fast again. The Bonn adaptation data is basically written for tuna.
Yellowtail and most other reef species. Fast and competitive, but they also shut down hard if pressured. Start fast, and if the bite dies, slow down before you change anything else.
Largemouth bass, freshwater casting. This is where cadence thinking pays off most, honestly. Most bass anglers fish at maybe 5 or 6 casts a minute and think they are covering water. Double it. Use a shorter cast, a faster retrieve, and keep moving your feet. The fish are not going to come find you.
Walleye. Slow. I know this breaks the pattern, but walleye are the exception that proves the rule: they are low-light, low-metabolism feeders and a fast cadence genuinely spooks them. 5 to 8 per minute with long pauses.
The pattern underneath all of it: match cadence to metabolic state. Cold, lethargic, neutral fish get slow cadence. Warm, active, competing fish get fast cadence. Water temperature is the master variable, and it is the one you can actually measure. 🔥
How to actually raise your cadence (the practical drill)
You cannot just decide to fish faster. Your whole motion has to get tighter. Here is the progression I used to get from 4 to 11, and it took about three trips.
Step one: shorten the cast. This is 80 percent of it. Most anglers cast 40 yards because it feels like fishing. At 10 per minute you do not have time for a 40-yard retrieve. Cut to 20 or 25 yards and you instantly buy back two seconds per cycle. You are not losing water; you are fishing the near water thoroughly, which is where most fish are anyway.
Step two: pick the target before the lure lands. The second-worst time-waster in fishing is deciding where to cast next while your lure is already in the water. Look at the next spot during the retrieve. Land, work, and immediately be ready.
Step three: cut the dead time at the boat. Every second you spend untangling, retying, checking your phone, or admiring the last fish is a cycle you did not fish. Rig two rods. Keep pliers where your hand goes without looking.
Step four: count out loud for one full hour. Seriously. It is deeply annoying and it is the fastest way to calibrate. Use a clicker app if you want the data. Most people who think they are fishing at 10 are fishing at 6.
Step five: build the pause back in. Once you are fast, you will have deleted the pause. Put it back deliberately. Fast cycle, real pause inside it.
Step six: vary on purpose. Every three to five cycles, change one thing. Stroke length. Pause length. Retrieve speed. Depth. Something. Set a mental metronome for it if you have to. 🛠️
The mistakes I made for years
- Confusing thorough with slow. I thought spending three minutes on one spot meant I was being careful. I was being slow. Those are different.
- Never counting. The single biggest gap in my fishing was that I had no idea what my own cadence was. Measure it once and you will never guess again.
- Fishing the retrieve and ignoring the fall. In slow pitch, roughly the overwhelming majority of fish eat on the drop. I spent years working the upstroke because it felt like working.
- Using the same cadence all day. Covered. It adapts out.
- Buying rods without thinking about recovery speed. If the blank will not recover, the cadence ceiling is the rod's, not yours, and no amount of effort fixes it.
- Going fast when the fish were cold. Cadence is not a virtue. It is a match to metabolic state. In 42-degree water, slow wins and fast loses. 😅
Frequently asked questions
How many casts per minute should I make when jigging? Somewhere in the 9 to 13 range for most active saltwater species, with about 11 being the number my own logbook keeps pointing at. Adjust down for cold water and neutral fish, up for actively feeding pelagics.
Is fishing faster always better? No. Faster is better up to a point, and then presentation quality collapses and the fish's sensory system adapts you out. My data shows catch rate falling again past roughly 14 per minute.
What is the best jigging cadence for snapper? About 10 to 12 cycles per minute with a genuine pause on the fall. Snapper eat the drop more often than they eat the rip.
How fast should I retrieve a metal jig, and does depth change the answer? Fast enough to look like a fleeing baitfish when they are active, and barely at all when they are not. As a starting point, a steady moderate retrieve with a hard pause every few cranks outfishes a constant fast grind more often than people expect.
Should I use the same cadence all day? No, and this is the most important answer in this article. Lateral line afferents adapt to repetitive stimulation, and the adaptation is worse with higher amplitude and faster repetition. Change something every three to five cycles.
What rod do I need for a fast cadence? Something with fast recovery. A stiff, light, high-modulus blank with a light tip recovers faster and therefore supports a faster stroke rate. A soft, slow, heavy blank physically caps your cadence.
Does cadence matter for freshwater bass fishing? Enormously, and it is probably the most underrated variable in bass fishing. Most anglers fish far slower than they think. Count yourself once and you will see it immediately.
How do I stop a fish from getting used to my lure? Vary the signal. Cadence, stroke length, pause, depth, speed, and lure profile are all variables. A signal that never changes stops being information. 🐟
Sources worth your time
- Mogdans, J., Müller, C., Frings, M., and Raap, F. (2017). Adaptive responses of peripheral lateral line nerve fibres to sinusoidal wave stimuli. Journal of Comparative Physiology A.
- Aksnes and Giske encounter rate model, as summarized in Light, Optics, and Fish Bioenergetics (reaction distance and search volume)
- Piscivore-prey fish interactions: mechanisms behind diurnal patterns in prey selectivity in brown and clear water. PLOS ONE.
- Sweka, J. A., and Hartman, K. J. (2003). Reduction of reactive distance and foraging success in smallmouth bass following exposure to turbidity. Transactions of the American Fisheries Society.23%5B135:ROTOTF%5D2.0.CO;2)
- Osenberg and Mittelbach: Using foraging theory to study trophic interactions (encounter rate, handling time, attack probability)
Go count yourself 🎣
I want to leave you with the thing that actually changed my fishing, and it is not the number.
It is the counting.
For fifteen years I had no idea what my cadence was. I had opinions about it. I had a feeling that I was a thorough angler. I had a strong sense that patience was a virtue. What I did not have was a number, and the moment Rudy handed me one, everything I believed about my own technique got tested in about ninety seconds.
So here is my challenge. Next trip, count one hour. Just one. Use a clicker app, use a watch, use a buddy with a bad attitude like Rudy. Write the number down. Then try to hit 11 for the next hour and see what happens.
I am asking you to do this because the number will almost certainly surprise you, and because I have yet to meet an angler whose first measured cadence was faster than they believed.
And I genuinely want to hear the results. What is your number? Did you come in higher or lower than you thought you would? Drop it in the comments with what you were fishing for. I read every one, and I am still logging mine. 🔥🌊
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