Instinctive & Intuitive or Technical & Scientific

[Dales]

Whats your general approach to angling. Are you the sort of angler that is guided by an intuiative feel you have for a water. Do you use your watercraft or Jedi powers to weigh up a section of water and fish it with your gut feeling. Do you just know where the marginal shelf will drop away and can you set your float at depth just by instinct and still catch fish? Are you guided by a feeling that this place looks right and feels right. Can you hit the same spot with your feeder or near enough that you feel it does not matter.

 

Or do you frown on the instinctive angler? Are you driven by the science of angling. Do you need to plumb the swim and set your float at the exact correct depth everytime. Do you need to map out your swim with marker rod or fish finder before you even think of casting out. Do you need to clip up for every cast, mark the line. Keep casting until you land your bait on the same spot.

 

Do you fall in to one camp or the other, or are you a bit of both. Obviously water craft is very important to both types of angler, but is gut feeling that you are in the right spot enough or do you need to start measuring and plumbing up to help back up your decision.

 

Do you see the benefits of the hard work of taking the time to get everything perfect but still enjoy a pitch up and cast in session from time to time.

 

Does a scientific apprach to angling remove all the romance and artistry from angling? Or is that just what people say because the technical angler is catching more then them

[kirisute]

Whats your general approach to angling. Are you the sort of angler that is guided by an intuiative feel you have for a water. Do you use your watercraft or Jedi powers to weigh up a section of water and fish it with your gut feeling. Do you just know where the marginal shelf will drop away and can you set your float at depth just by instinct and still catch fish? Are you guided by a feeling that this place looks right and feels right. Can you hit the same spot with your feeder or near enough that you feel it does not matter.

 

Or do you frown on the instinctive angler? Are you driven by the science of angling. Do you need to plumb the swim and set your float at the exact correct depth everytime. Do you need to map out your swim with marker rod or fish finder before you even think of casting out. Do you need to clip up for every cast, mark the line. Keep casting until you land your bait on the same spot.

 

Do you fall in to one camp or the other, or are you a bit of both. Obviously water craft is very important to both types of angler, but is gut feeling that you are in the right spot enough or do you need to start measuring and plumbing up to help back up your decision.

 

Do you see the benefits of the hard work of taking the time to get everything perfect but still enjoy a pitch up and cast in session from time to time.

 

Does a scientific apprach to angling remove all the romance and artistry from angling? Or is that just what people say because the technical angler is catching more then them

 

i think you have to do your fair share of both to be an effective fisherman.

for instance my regular carp lake i know pretty much off by heart. water depth, shelf location and fish movements and pathways. so i can usually roll-up, set my depth, put some feed in and start to fish and be catching alot faster than people that have sat there well before i turned up.

is that instinct of or simply "knowing" the water and how it fishes/how to fish it? and by knowing that i guess im falling into the scientific area....

but on lakes/rivers ive never fished before i will usually go with the rule of thumb and then change methodology and location according to what results in the first hour or so. you can make an observed knowledgable choice to fish against a lily bed, or under an overhanging branch etc

i think it all rolls into ones knowledge of the sport....both methods work and can produce; but the more time you spend building your own knowledge in both camps then the better your experience will be; maybe? LOL

effort and knowledge always reward themselves eventually; be it scientific or instinctual

[Dick Dastardly]

Ive got a foot in both camps I think Dales!

[Anderoo]

A bit of both I think. Sometimes you get a feeling to do something, change something, explore somewhere, move swims, stay put, put more bait in or don't put any more in, etc. and I think you have to follow those instincts. There's rarely a logical explanation, but there's something telling you to do it, and it often proves to be the right thing to do.

 

On the other hand I suppose I am quite 'scientific', in the sense that I need to know why I am doing something. On stillwaters this means having a very good understanding of the topography and being quite OCD about accuracy and baiting. On rivers it means understanding the flows, changes of depths and nature of the bottom. It's essentially down to preparation, spending as much time as you need to get to understand the fish and the water before starting to fish, and also making sure that when you come to fish, the spot/swim you want to fish from is suitable.

 

At the heart of it all is basic knowledge of fish behaviour - when you understand the impulses and behaviour of the different species and can look 'through' the water to what's going on under the surface, it is often quite obvious what you need to do. It doesn't always work of course But I like to start with the fish going about their daily lives, and work backwards from there.

 

Which leads on to experimenting. I really enjoy trying new things and testing theories. Some work, some don't, but I find it really liberating to accept I know very little, and the only way I can learn is by trying lots of different things. At some point patterns start to emerge and then it's quite easy to refine what you're doing.

 

I don't see it as 'hard work', to me that is what fishing is. Reeling in the fish at the end of it is fun, but it's just the very final step in a journey. And once you've got to that point, then you can just pitch up and cast!

 

There's one major aspect of fishing that really blurs this distinction, and that's baiting. Ask any successful angler what they're baiting with and why, and you'll get science. Ask them how much they put in, how often, when and why, and you'll get intuition No-one can explain it. It 'just feels right'.

[tony tinca]

i think you have to do your fair share of both to be an effective fisherman.

for instance my regular carp lake i know pretty much off by heart. water depth, shelf location and fish movements and pathways. so i can usually roll-up, set my depth, put some feed in and start to fish and be catching alot faster than people that have sat there well before i turned up.

is that instinct of or simply "knowing" the water and how it fishes/how to fish it? and by knowing that i guess im falling into the scientific area....

but on lakes/rivers ive never fished before i will usually go with the rule of thumb and then change methodology and location according to what results in the first hour or so. you can make an observed knowledgable choice to fish against a lily bed, or under an overhanging branch etc

i think it all rolls into ones knowledge of the sport....both methods work and can produce; but the more time you spend building your own knowledge in both camps then the better your experience will be; maybe? LOL

effort and knowledge always reward themselves eventually; be it scientific or instinctual

 

I think your right and it can take many years to become accomplished , its about seeing things from a fishes point of view and not mine , like when the water in a lake has dropped a few inches you might be able to see an area of bare earth on the very edge of an island where the carp have grubbed about and exposed the bank and cast a method feeder right tight to it rather than fishing up to the lovely looking lilies to the side .

Its definitley about technique and its definitley about intuition and making the right choices and knowing what to change when something isnt working .

When you fish a water that you know well you can be be settled into catching before the others have started and that can give you a massive psychological advantage , but when you fish somewhere new its down to thinking quickly and making the right choices based on fishing knowledge so intuition then.

Its about applying yourself to different venues as well , when i went to the itchen i didnt really have much experience of rivers because i hadnt fished one for nearly 20 years but after a slow morning i changed my approach and started to work for it by feeding 4 maggots every 20 seconds regardless of whether i was playing a fish or whatever and feeding small balls of liquidised bread every 5 mins and although the bread seemed to attract a few more tiny brownies in the closing few hours i managed 6 big chub and 5 or six decent grayling , Im sounding like im blowing my own trumpet here but what it boiles down to is just years of angling experience and some people learn slowly and some people get it quickly but we all get there if we work for it and can take direction from more experienced anglers.

Ive learnt more from this site from anglers with more experience than me than i ever would have learned on my own.

Whatever you think you know about angling there is always someone out there that knows something you can benefit from , thats the magic of angling and why we dont get bored because we are always improving

[far bank stalker]

science at home, gut and polarised glasses on the bank

[tony tinca]

science at home, gut and polarised glasses on the bank

 

That is short but sweet , im just getting my new prescription glasses fitted with thin polarised lenses with all the anti reflection coatings etc , not cheap but ive heard its worth it .

Does it make a lot of difference to just normal shades as ive never tried polorised glasses ?

[Mat Hillman]

I think that as well as Instinct Intuition and science a fair amount of lazyness goes into my fishing too

 

ie

 

"Bugger me I've been walking for ages and that looks like a nice flat comfy swim"

 

"bit windy today I'll go to the sheltered end of the lake"

 

"well I can see the fish rolling on the far bank, but I can just about cast there from the carpark side"

 

 

Mat

[Dales]

I think that as well as Instinct Intuition and science a fair amount of lazyness goes into my fishing too

 

ie

 

"Bugger me I've been walking for ages and that looks like a nice flat comfy swim"

 

"bit windy today I'll go to the sheltered end of the lake"

 

"well I can see the fish rolling on the far bank, but I can just about cast there from the carpark side"

 

 

Mat

 

But I'm sure it's scientificaly proven that most fish get caught near the Carp park end. But it might be because those swims are always fished

[watatoad]

Having deliberately only read the basic thread question as I wanted to answer honestly and without reference nor thought of what others have put down. Which I have to admit I do more often than I perhaps would like to admit as it has often caused a little upset.

 

Please let me let you into a secret The Way of the Toad ...hehehe...but I am actually not joking.

 

After fishing for so very long it is almost impossible for me to say honestly where instinct and/or experience and/or intuition and/or scientific/technical skills cut in.

 

I have worked hard to develop fairly good watercraft knowledge and skills, but I had an unusually good start to my angling life in that I was very young and the men who took it upon themselves to teach me were so very kind and patient and understanding of a rather inpatient, anxious and excitable young lad and being rather old each had a lifetimes experience and often hard earned knowledge behind them. They ranged from gamekeepers to poachers to specimen hunters to match men to fanatical anglers, my rather unusual background also added into the equation I spent a lot of my holidays in very different parts of the country fishing vastly different rivers, streams, canals, ponds and lakes. The consequence of this is that by the time I was fifteen I was a pretty experienced angler and at home on any type of water, although I still turn green in a rowing boat especially in an estuary and forget about sea fishing from a boat no chance and I have clocked up fifty eight seasons of angling now.

 

However I am still learning new things and by that I do not mean just new technologies but different ways of doing many things because every angler I meet and/or talk to has different ideas and experience and knowledge than I have and I am always willing to listen and learn, even though I am an arrogant Toad.

 

Do I read much yes but in fits and starts usually targeting on new books dedicated to one species of fish rather than the more general fishing I never read biographies and auto biographies or tales of fishing and angling adventures which so fill our lists of available angling books. Being a person with a wide, mixed and very large circle of friends I am often given books on my favourite subjects which has caused some considerable doubling in areas of my little library.

 

On a stretch of water I know well I still plumb the depths and on a water I do not know I plumb the depth much more. Do I look for features perhaps based on experience more than instinct and intuition probably. A new range of floats comes out and I am in line to look and most likely try them out, the same goes for reels, rods line and many other accessories. However and equally I am just as likely to pick up something second-hand that I either like based on previous experience or perhaps I see something that I have not tried out and fancy giving it a go.

 

So for myself I would say that I am a total mixture of anything and everything to do with angling and nature when it comes to fishing, so I cannot choose just one area nor decide that it is experience, instinct, intuition, knowledge, ability, technique or technology.

Edited March 17, 2011 by watatoad