Sound Advice Nets More Fish
It could be said that the mental game of fishing is equal parts patience and imagination. Could that be why it’s so much fun for an older and younger person to fish together? The patience and experience that maturity brings teamed with the imagination and energy of youth is almost inevitably a winning combination.
But what if you can’t always have a young person along? How can you exercise your imagination and break out of the rut of familiar patterns and assumptions? One way is to consider just how different the world on the other side of the water’s surface is. The mental agility required to accomplish that intellectual transposition is one mark of a truly accomplished angler. The shimmering, rippling boundary between the air world and the water world is much starker than the difference between night and day or heat and cold. All of our air-breathing expectations are radically twisted in the liquid physics of the fish.
Subsurface visibility is limited, so sound and vibration are much more significant in target aquisition.
In order to really understand how the dynamics of an underwater environment change nearly everything, all it really takes is a diving mask and snorkel. You can do this experiment in a swimming pool but the point is much better made in the kind of water you’ll be fishing in. Immerse yourself so that the diving mask is divided halfway between water and air. Now look through the water and then up through the air and back again. How far can you see in the water compared to the air? What can you imagine this implies for the fish you are seeking?
Now for the really interesting part of the experiment: listen to everything you can hear above the water. Try to catalog it and understand where each sound is coming from. The next part is where the snorkel becomes important. Immerse your head so that your ears are completely filled with water. Now close your eyes and listen.
In a typical body of water in the United States on any given day you are likely to hear the drone of engine noises from quite far away. Depending on conditions you can hear engine noise three to five times farther away underwater than in the air. Imagine the implications here. What else can you hear? The splash of waves? The clicking sound produced by freshwater drum? The rattle of shot-filled crankbaits?
In the fish’s world, where visibility is often limited to just a few feet, sound is a dominant sense. Their lateral line as well as inner ears make their entire body a sound or vibration detector, attuning the fish to the distance, direction, and even physical characteristics of the source. Most species rely primarily on acoustics for prey acquisition and threat avoidance. That’s why Secret Weapon® devotes even more attention to the acoustic signatures of our products than to their amazing and innovative appearance. The secrets of Secret Weapon Lures are both invisible and inaudible in your tackle box. At the end of your line, though, the secret becomes evident. The ability to create an almost infinite array of acoustic signatures by configuring the Secret Weapon InnoBait™ tackle system to produce sound your prey will find irresistible is limited only by your imagination.
Increase your musical range
Hook up the boat, ease down the driveway, and point your truck in the direction of the lake. Fire up the radio, and search for some “gone fishing” music. First song is something about rodeos. Nope. Hit the button. The next tune laments a cheating husband… definitely not that one. Keep punching buttons until Rodney Clawson’s Bass Tournament Song fills the cab. That’s exactly what you wanted to hear! You knew it the moment you heard it.
Bass prefer certain “tunes,” too. They are constantly attuned to sounds or vibrations that signal food and are hard-wired to respond when they hear that tune. As anglers, our challenge is to figure out what they’ll respond to in any given circumstance.
Consider a typical lure as being capable of acoustically representing one song by one artist. What do you imagine the odds are of guessing the exact right song and artist as the favorite of the fish you’re seeking? With Secret Weapon Lures you are effectively prepared with not just every song from every artist but the possibility of creating new harmonies, duets, trios, from every artist from any genre and every era, just use your imagination. If you don’t believe that will give you a significant advantage on the water you’ll probably want to work a lot more on the patience side of your mental fishing game.
Again, take your imagination underwater. Begin to consider not just the music your Secret Weapon is producing, but also the arena in which it is being played. How does the bottom structure amplify or subdue an acoustic signature? In weeds or vegetation should you turn up the volume? In a rocky cove or inlet would a higher or lower frequency signature be more effective? With Secret Weapon InnoBait™ tackle system components you can craft anything from a Stradivarius to a washtub bass. You control the volume and frequency, the pitch as well as the tone your lure produces.
By observing the results you can quickly learn to bracket what works and fine tune the most successful configuration for exactly your conditions and objectives. Yes, some other lures can produce a range of sounds based on how they are cranked and where they’re set to run in the water but only Secret Weapon Lures afford the widest possible range of acoustic signatures.
Mind the ’cline
One of the more critical aspects of designing and running acoustical signature baits is an awareness of the thermocline — the boundary separating a lake’s upper and lower water layers. Almost all sunlight striking a lake is absorbed near the surface. Wind and waves churn that layer, distributing heat and oxygen uniformly. At the thermocline, the temperature transitions rapidly. Below it is cooler, less-oxygenated water.
Fishermen have been aware of the thermocline even before the advent of sonar. Norse fishermen over 500 years ago set their nets and lines at different depths seasonally, adjusting for the thermocline, although they obviously wouldn’t have referred to it as that.
An interesting property of the thermocline is that it represents a boundary not only to temperature and water density, but to sound as well. During World War II submarines on all sides took advantage of the relative acoustic impenetrability of the thermocline to avoid enemy sonar.
In the common practice of cranking in a bait just off the bottom, the acoustical signature of many baits can be dampened by sound-absorbent bottom structures. Weed, mud, stumps or just about any other biomass can soak up the sound energy of high speed spinner blades. As the bait is retrieved coming up off the bottom it becomes momentarily audible and interesting. Depending on the distance between the bottom and the thermocline, to fish near the bottom the bait may appear to vanish as it climbs and then penetrates the thermocline. Conversely, once the bait is above the thermocline the angler may realize it is far off the bottom and began retrieving quickly, outpacing any interested predators.
Fortunately with the almost infinite adaptability of the Secret Weapon InnoBait™ tackle system there are a variety of both simple and sophisticated solutions to this dilemma. One is to stay on or near the bottom but configure the blades for a much lower frequency vibration. Lower frequencies tend to penetrate obstructions more efficiently and can therefore be recognized by fish below the thermocline, where purely visual acquisition is next to impossible. Alternatively, if the depth of the thermocline is known, a higher frequency or even asymmetrical blade configuration can be set to run just below the thermocline. This takes advantage of the fact that the separation between the two thermal layers reflects sound back from the direction it came. Using the thermocline in conjunction with Secret Weapon’s acoustic signature variability allows the thermocline to be used as a virtual amplifier either immediately above or below the ’cline.
Of course there are several other obvious strategies to exploit acoustical signature manipulation. One obvious but remarkably effective technique is to configure a lure that will dive back and forth through the thermocline. Depth control during retrieves is a function of lure weight, retrieve rate, and the shape, size, and number of blades you clip onto the lure. Smaller, narrower, and fewer blades achieve greater depths at the same rate of retrieve. To achieve maximum depths, select a heavy 13/16-ounce Quickstrike™ or 9/16-ounce Sidearm™ spinnerbait, and then match it with the blade attachments from a 3/16- or 5/16-oz bait.
With a reasonably sensitive rod tip, seasoned anglers will often be able to discern the subtle lag and pull as a bait passes through the thermal barrier. For predatory fish this can become a very intriguing game of auditory hide and seek. Again, with the Secret Weapon InnoBait™ tackle system the audiovisual configurations are limited only by the angler’s imagination and awareness of subsurface variables.
It all comes back to patterns
The brain of every living creature is, at its essence, more or less a survival oriented, self-replicating pattern recognition machine. The angler has the advantage of an extremely powerful, highly evolved pattern recognition machine capable of identifying very subtle, minute, sometimes nearly indiscernible patterns. On the other hand the angler has the disadvantage of an extremely powerful, highly evolved pattern recognition machine capable of identifying very subtle, minute, sometimes nearly indiscernible patterns. Yes, you read that right.
As with almost anything really powerful the edge cuts both ways. When trying to out-think something with a brain no bigger than a walnut that hasn’t evolved significantly and over a million years, it’s easy for us to over-complicate things. And when combining very advanced thought processes with an intricate concept such as a acoustical signature design it’s easy to over-think the problem. This is just one of many times it will be helpful to remember one of Einstein’s less quoted dictums, “Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
Predatory fish are food finding machines. They are also an energy management machines. They can hear sound or detect vibration sources long distances underwater and are adept at pattern recognition. Awash in a sea of vibrations and sound, they filter out ambient noise and key in on the acoustic signatures of potential food. When it targets a potential meal, somehow its primitive brain performs a cost/benefit analysis on whether it will be worth exploring a distant acoustical temptation in return for the energy expended to acquire the potential nourishment.
A lure that is not limited to one acoustic profile but can emulate several potential morsels (or one larger one) at the same time is capable of drawing prey from a much farther distance. The multi-blade configurations of Secret Weapon Lures are intended not so much to be noisier as to represent a higher risk/benefit ratio for fish that hear them over longer distances. As a simple expression of pattern recognition algorithms, more food equals justification for more time and energy spent pursuing it.
The ability to design exactly the right bait where it’s needed and when it’s needed opens up a whole world of opportunities to exercise your imagination. Anglers who learn the secrets of Secret Weapon Lures have a whole new reason to call fish “brain food."
 Joe Haubenreich
President, SWL
May 2007
If you want to learn more...
Density Stratification, Water on the Web: Lake Ecology
Lake Stratification, Wikipedia
Thermocline, Wiipedia
Themocline: The Barrier, The Ultimate Bass Fishing Resource Guide
The Thermocline and Fishing, Bobberstop.com Fishing Resources
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