Line Watching?????

[Catt]

Y'all need to night fish for a year straight & then we'll have this talk again.

I'm not talking just the full moon but every phase including the dark moon.

Night fishing will completely change how you "feel" bites.

Many times when flipping, pitching, or punching you will not see or feel line movement. The bass will inhale your bait & not move!

[Bluebasser86]

If the line doesn't move, you will not feel it. You feel line movement, line isn't a living nerve!

No rod ever made will be as sensitive to line movement than your finger/ thumb tips, they have living nerves to transmit the movement to your brain. Believing that your rod can transmit line movement better than a finger tip touching kine is naive.

Being aware of what the line is doing requires that you feel and watch the line. Watching line for movement takes practice and becomes as natural as feeling line move. Strike indicators can be obvious or subtle, the obvious take care of themselves, detecting subtle strikes requires practice. The best spot to watch line move is where it enters the water. The other area of the line to watch is the controlled slack, if you are not moving the lure and the line tightens slight more, something has added resistance to the lures movement, usually that slight change in slack line is a strike.

Don't for a moment believe that only bass anglers should be line watchers, this applies all types of fish. I have watched live bait tuna anglers on a drift miss the fact a that a tuna had their bait and swam back toward the boat, sometimes under the boat and out the other side without them detecting line movement of feeling the fish until their rods starting to bend.

Tom

I actually learned how to watch my line while bluegill fishing. I used to cast a small baitholder hook with a piece of nightcrawler and no weight or bobber to likely areas and let it sink slowly. Whenever I saw that telltale twitch of my line, I'd set the hook. 

[Virtuoso]

Y'all need to night fish for a year straight & then we'll have this talk again.

I'm not talking just the full moon but every phase including the dark moon.

Night fishing will completely change how you "feel" bites.

Many times when flipping, pitching, or punching you will not see or feel line movement. The bass will inhale your bait & not move!

You make an excellent point for using fine equipment. Those light pickups are d**n near impossible without a quality rod and line. Ive fished blindfolded before as a sensitivity test. I know what its like.

People lose more fish than they think because they don't ever know the bass picked up their bait. Its not a big deal unless your competing

[Catt]

The art of feeling a bite is a fine combination of watching your line and feeling for unnatural sensations of what your lure shouldn't feel like.

Some times you will feel that classic "tap".

Some times you'll only see line movement

Some times your line will simply go slack

But, some times there will only be a feeling of heaviness that is almost like your will not move.

What helps is keeping a certain amount of tension on your line while at the same time keeping a certain amout of slackness in your line. To the average angler this makes no sense at all but to the seasoned it makes total sense.

Watch your line? Yes

But it's way more than that