By Jerry Miller

Outdoor Columnist

When you compare fishing with other sports, you will quickly see a big difference.

Other sports, like hunting and golfing, are more visual. A hunter can see his quarry. A fisherman rarely sees a bass, with the exception of spring time when bass are on beds, or when he spots a school of bass.

A bird hunter flushes out the birds so that he can target his prey. A bass fisherman targets areas that he hopes are holding bass, and he then has to try to entice the bass to strike.

Just one of the difficulties of bass fishing is trying to determine every day where the strike zone is. On a real clear lake, bass have been known to come from 20 or more feet away to strike a top water lure. But when fish are inactive you must place your lure within inches of the bass in order to entice a reaction strike.

Then there is the matter of how fast or how slow do you retrieve your lure in order to get the bass to strike. Speed of retrieve is often crucial. When surface temperatures drop to the low 50s or into the 40s, you must slow down your retrieve. Bass become sluggish in cold water.

Trying to determine what depth most of the bass are holding in is also crucial. Without knowing what depth the majority of the fish are holding in really complicates matters. Perhaps one of the fastest ways to locate the best depth is to turn on your graph and criss-cross the mouth of a cove or a portion of the lake to visually determine in what depth they are holding. But this is only one clue to the puzzle.

Last week on Lake Palestine I spotted a lot of bass suspended in 14 to 20 feet of water. But as usual I began fishing a shallow hump (five foot) with a Nichols Rattle Shad and caught about a dozen bass. You can almost always find some fish shallow during the day, even on the coldest day.

Fortunately, for bass fishermen, we have electronic graphs that help us locate bass structures. As an example, take wintertime. Basically, in the wintertime we know that you can target points, humps and road beds and catch some bass. Points with a creek intersecting it will always hold some bass. When graphing a hump or point or road bed, you have to mark some fish and shad, toss out a buoy, and you’re in business. In the winter some of your largest bass will hover just below the shad near the bottom and feed on dead and dying baitfish that flutter down from the school.

A fisherman’s primary weapon, especially in the winter, is a graph. A graph is like having underwater eyes. This does give us a big advantage in locating our quarry. Unfortunately, most fishermen simply turn on their graph and never use any manual adjustments. The manual mode will allow you to fine tune your graph and see a lot more detail.

The only problem with “seeing” fish on your graph is that you don’t always know what species they are. Just because you see fish on the graph doesn’t mean they are bass. Again, that’s what makes bass fishing a lot more complicated than any other sport. The key to becoming a good bass fisherman is plain old hard work and patience.

Every sport has its own set of problems. One of the reasons I’ve always liked bass fishing is the challenge it offers. If bass fishing was easy, I probably would have lost interest a long time ago. Whether bass fishing is more complicated or difficult than other sports is debatable.

There have been days when it takes me the better part of a day to “figure out” the bass. But once you do finally put the puzzle together, you quickly forget about the day long struggle. That’s what keeps you coming back for more.

Miller can be e-mailed atgonefishing813@peoplepc.com