Smiling no more?
 

Hi,

I was taking some fish with a smiling bill bucktail earlier today. Prob. had about 8 fish. Eventually, the white paint came off the bucktail but also the lead got smashed down enough so that there really was no "mouth" left as a result of hitting the rocks in the water. It looked like a jetty caster bucktail. I pretty much stopped catching fish. The guy next to me (we were catching about the same amount of fish) continued to catch fish. Do you think it is possible that the bucktail started to swim at a different depth and this affected the results?

The other thing was that the rip shifted a little with the tide but I was still able to reach the rip - but not quite as far out into it. I was still catching fish earlier on my shorter casts.

Thanks

More likely as the tide changed you needed a heavier (or lighter) bucktail.