Here’s a shot from Jeff Gustafson’s Humminbird graph that perfectly illustrates what he’s been doing all week. Gussy is sitting in 21.1 feet of water, as is indicated in the top left corner of this shot. In the bottom left quadrant, we can see two marks. The higher, smaller mark is Gussy’s Smeltinator Jighead/Z-Man Jerk ShadZ combo. The bigger one just below and to the right of his bait is a smallmouth.
Gussy has been “moping” all week. Moping is a technique where an angler drops a Damiki rig down below the boat and just eases around, or mopes around, looking for a bass. What you can’t see in this image is the handful of other smallmouth “glued to the bottom”. But there were two or three more fish rising off of and sinking back down to the bottom along with the one you see in this shot. In fact, to start with, this fish wasn’t even visible in the shot. Not until Gussy trolled over it and it rose up off the bottom.
Gussy reportedly tried this on roughly a hundred spots, having to fish any rock vein or little discrepancy in the bottom contour that he found while idling, to see if he could get bit. Because the fish were so close to the bottom that they wouldn’t even show up on the graph. In doing this all week during practice, Gussy found only 3 productive areas. That’s a 3% return on the investment of his time. But it’s looking like the financial ROI is going to be astronomically greater.
