Cool illustrations.
My intent of my comment was inline with David’s interest in:
and also:
I have been fishing striped bass for a long time and see a lot of parallels in behavior.
The most note worthy are the similarities on how they use structure and current to feed and how their mood to feed is extremely variable.
Half of the time they will feed readily without much coaxing. The rest of the time they are really keyed in on something specific or are not actively feeding at all.
The rule of thumb is to first identify available forage then cycle through profiles similar to that forage. Try different presentations until you find what they respond to. I always start with a dead drift. Then introduce imbellishments. Then introduce changes of speed depth and movement pause tempo variation. If no response, then I move to a completely different profile…and repeat. If no response…I move.
Manipulation is not the only trigger to convert fish that are not feeding.
Recently I had fished for some brookies and skating flies seemed to be the ticket to the actively feeding fish. I came across a trout in slower water that did not respond to the skate…or the manipulation. It was a slower moving pool in the brook about 5 feet deep and the trout was hovering a foot or two off the bottom 3 feet out from the bank I was standing on. I dropped the fly above it and allowed it sink naturally a couple inches in front of it.
It enhaled the fly!!!
that never works!!!
What I am getting at is that the angler’s flexibility to experiment to unlock what each fish wants is as important as having the skill to properly use each technique.
My river leopard outing is another example. My buddy slayed the trout with a olive woolly bugger on a river where the trout are known to have a preference to that form. The key is to find what works and use it and not get caught up in what you should be doing but rather what the fish want you to do.