Some anglers identify completely and wholeheartedly as tournament bass anglers. They live, eat, sleep, and breathe the competition lifestyle.

Others are exclusively dry fly fishermen for wild trout.

Still, others can’t imagine doing anything but throwing niblets for carp.

I was in that first category for a long time. Even though I stopped fishing any sort of derbies a while back, everything about my fishing lifestyle was influenced by the tours. I stayed on top of the latest trends, and kept score of my numbers over the course of a “fun day,” trying to figure out what my best five would have weighed.

But as I’ve strayed into other spheres, some casually, some now verging on addiction, I’ve realized that the fishing that attracts and retains me best involves surface lures. It can be marauding yellowfin tuna, gluttonous Amazonian peacocks, or Mexican largemouths. If I can catch ‘em on a surface lure, that’s what makes me happy. I don’t go as far as the old timers who say “I’d rather catch one on a topwater than 10 on a worm,” but I understand where they’re coming from.

Lately, we’ve had a lot of talk in the bass world about the role of forward-facing sonar in opposition to “traditional” or “old school” bass fishing. I’m still not sure where I come down on that with respect to the top-level tours. Indeed, my feelings vacillate from day to day, sometimes depending on who I talked to last. But again, I understand the sentiment. 

What we like most about fishing is something primitive. It could be flipping into a button bush and seeing the whole bush shake, then setting the hook before feeling the bite. It could be throwing a deep diving crankbait on a ledge and feeling it get knocked sideways as you pause it off a stump.

For me, it’s the visual component that makes it most real and makes me feel it most deeply. Yes, some bass sip a popper or spook like a trout gently sipping a size 18 dry, but most often a topwater strike is violent. That’s even more the case with peacocks and yellowfins. When I see sailfish in the spread, with their bills going like windshield wipers, it gets me more excited than seeing one as a blip on a screen. It’s probably why my bucket list species include GTs and golden dorados. What I like is violence, the same thing that draws some people to boxing or MMA, and the breaking of the water’s surface is to me, what a flying mouthpiece is to other fans, except for the fact that while the hubbub stops, I fully hope to be connected to the fish that had the gall to disturb the peace.