(Editor's note: The following is the latest installment in a series of fishing tips presented by The Bass University. Check back each Friday for a new tip.)
Forrest Wood Cup champion Bryan Thrift is known as one of the best “junk fishermen” in the world, but that doesn’t mean he spends all of his time shallow. Indeed, as he demonstrated at Lake Hamilton, he’s a master of the offshore game, too. It’s a lake-by-lake and trip-by-trip determination where he focuses and for how long.
He believes that there are lakes where there’s some sort of offshore bite all year long, although it’s not always deep. At Guntersville, for example, a decent population spawns on offshore grass. At the same time, there are certain fisheries “where you have to be on the bank at certain times of year.”
Even if you think the offshore fish aren’t the way to win, they can be valuable for filling out limits on tough days. They tend to group up more than fish on the bank, and they’re often less pressured. That’s why Thrift spends ample time staring into his Humminbird graphs.
“The whole key to offshore fishing is not being afraid to sit on your butt and idle around and look for that little piece of structure,” he explained. Once he finds it, he’s not apt to sit down in a seat and rot for hours. He’ll run and gun just the same as he might when going down the bank, but he knows that when he hits paydirt it can pay off in a big way. “When you find that special group of fish, you’re more apt to win,” he added. That means that you can go hours without a bite, or without finding fish when graphing, and then hit the winning school. Accordingly, he dedicates a portion of almost every practice to it.
One tool that he relies on his side-imaging, which he describes as “two flashlights going out.” While most anglers divide their screen down the middle with a vertical line, showing up to 180 feet out to each side, sometimes Thrift divides them with a horizontal line that divides the screen into top and bottom portions. One part shows the area to the left of his boat and the other shows the area to the right, but now he has twice as much detail. “I can really see in detail each individual rock,” he said.
He’s also relies heavily on his Humminbird 360 technology. When fishing grass, for example, he can easily see where it makes a point or there’s an indentation. It also indicates how far away those features lie, which allows him to make pinpoint casts to high-percentage spots. One tip he provides all users of this incredible option is to take a Sharpie pen and make a mark on the trolling motor shaft and on the 360 module itself. That way if they become unaligned he can straighten them and thereby know exactly what he’s looking at and where it lies in relation to the nose of the boat.
If you want to learn some of the additional elements of Thrift’s electronics strategy, along with his special jig modifications for offshore fishing, check out his full video filmed on the water, available only by subscribing to The Bass University TV.
