I’ve been very fortunate, over the last 43 years as a TV show host, to have learned a great deal from professional bass fishermen, fishing and hunting guides and friends about the small adjustments that increase your catch or kill.

They are mostly practices that I certainly didn’t think of but learned from my time with experienced professionals. Permit me with random dissertation of some of those practices and even “tricks” I learned that, if you put them in your bag of tricks and wealth of knowledge, you’ll catch more, bag more and, if it matters to you beyond the overall exposure and experience, make the adventures more worthwhile.

So, in no particular order, here we go:

  • When using a buzz bait (any color is fine as long as it’s chartreuse). Then use a trailer hook with the barb flattened and hook turned down. You can use an oversized treble hook for a trailer also. Your catch will increase.
  • Your fishing line is the most important tool you have, so cut back a rod length of line each time you start out on a trip. You cannot remember the abuse your line and knots suffered in the last hour of the last trip you took.
  • Search on the internet and purchase a cooler full of live crawfish from LA. Use them under the docks and boat houses on the clear water reservoirs across the South. You can very reasonably expect to catch crappie, spot and largemouth bass on every crawfish you’ve purchased.
  • As Bill Dance once told me (and many others in his vast audience), if you’re casting to the bank, 95% of the fish are behind you. We fish in waters too shallow. Go deep.

Now a bit about hunting. I’ve been blessed to hunt all over the world; bear in Idaho, deer in Texas, wildebeest in Africa, whitetails (-22 degrees in Canada), antelope in Colorado, and on and on.

  • No matter where it might be, your biggest downfall is your lack of scent control. Cover your scent and use the wind.
  • Say you’re in a stand over a food plot and you’ve located some does and expect bucks to venture in soon. One decent buck ventures into sight. DON’T shoot him. It could be that the herd buck is back in the trees and brush with others just watching what happens to the first buck. Smaller bucks usually walk in first. Patience is a virtue. One time I was in Arkansas taping a TV show on a friend’s farm where only one buck could be taken. A decent ‘TV’ buck came into view. I shot him, and he fell dead and about five minutes later, while we were getting our TV production gear together to leave, in from the thick trees, a true 170 class monster whitetail walked out and flips my dead buck up in the air with his antlers. At the time, they were not friends. Had I been more patient, who knows … that was the largest set of whitetail antlers I’ve ever seen in all my hunting adventures.

Finally, no matter if it’s a fishing, hunting or a camping trip, take along your children or ones whose dad is not an outdoorsman or doesn’t live at home and teach him or her about the outdoors and the critters that live there.

They will treasure it and recall it the rest of their lives.