HARMONICS AND HUM

YOU’RE TROLLING A LEDGE, seamount or baitball with a handful of boats around you. No bites yet, but you’re steadily marking fish and making several passes over an area that should be producing. Then you notice white water exploding behind a boat just a few hundred yards away; they suddenly stop, and you look to see a blue marlin taking to the sky. Woefully you shout down to the cockpit, “Hooked up south of us!”

As the day wears on, you notice that same boat hooking up several more times, and you haven’t even had a knockdown. Listening to the radio chatter, the fishing sounds slow, but that one boat seems to catch well more than you and the rest of the fleet.

Heading home, you wonder what kind of voodoo they were practicing or what different techniques they were using to get all those bites. Later, when you chat with the skipper at the dock, you find out they were using the same techniques as you—pulling the same style and make of lures, or using the same baits. You think to yourself, Lucky boat. It would be easy to theorize that it was simple luck that brought them all those bites, but I disagree.

I tend to push aside unexplained chance such as luck or superstition, mainly because there is no way to replicate it for success; either one is just a random force we have no control over. What we can control is our location, boat, crew