Barret Duncan Blog

If you want to know whether a river fisherman understands moving water, don't look inside his tackle tray. Look at which direction his bow is pointed. Nine out of ten casual river boaters I run across do the exact same thing: they motor up to a beautiful gravel shoal or rocky current seam, drop anchor right in the middle of the flow, and cast downstream. They cast downstream because it feels comfortable. The current pulls their line tight, their lure vibrates vigorously without them having to crank the handle, and they feel like they have total control over the bait. And that is precisely why they go home with sore arms and an empty livewell. In moving water, casting downstream is a mechanical and biological dead end for three reasons: First, predators in a river never face downstream. River fish—whether we are talking about smallmouth bass, river walleye, or trophy catfish—are bound by the strict physics of fluid dynamics. They orient their noses directly into the current, holding...

Why casting accuracy doesn’t mean a thing if the river keeps spinning your boat into the rocks. A lot of guys think fishing moving water is just like fishing a farm pond, only with a little current pushing your line downstream. You see it every summer on our southern river shoals. An angler buys a clean new kayak, loads it up with five rods and a bucket of soft plastics, drops in below a dam or rapids, and within fifteen minutes they are fighting for their life just to stay off a submerged boulder while their line drifts completely out of the strike zone. River bass don't sit in the open torrent fighting the full force of the flow. They are masters of hydrodynamics. And if you don't learn how to position your boat relative to current seams and eddy lines, you’ll spend your whole afternoon paddling upstream instead of catching fish. 1. The Anatomy of an Eddy Line Whenever fast water runs into a stationary obstruction—a bridge piling, a limestone bluff, a gravel bar, or a sunken ...