INTERESTING THREAD! I beleive in an old golf saying (though I thouroughly detest the "sport") 'You are only as good as the people you play with". If you "play"with mediocre cronies your skill levels will only attain that same level. If you seek out those with, as my friend Alan Cordts says, "the passion" to learn more, find better ways and put in the time, you by your association with these same folks should become better yourself.
Being stubborn in accepting new ways to take fish or accepting new advances in gear technology can hinder you. Look at what is happening these days on the surf fishing scene. Rigged Sluggos, inland black bass techniques of a bullet weight and a large rubber worm taking cows from the surf. Tech lines and braids, fluorocarbon leaders and lines and the latest in reel designs and rod manufacturing with ever lighter components.
If you have that "passionate" drive to be the best you can be and also the desire to asociate yourself with the best at your chosen methodology it would only stand to reason that your success vs. failure rate should begin to tip the scale in your favor.
To be successfull you must make the conscious choice of who to fish with and that should be one of if not the primary task in becoming a better fisherman. As for having nights when the guy next to you is tonging them and your not, that happens more than most people will admit. I can remember a night pitching live eels in the canal where on both sides of me, guys who I was fishing with were on constantly, and I, using the same exact tackle and bait, could not draw a take. I left. Two years ago on Longnook in July Stifftip took 13 beautiful bass on the same exact plug and tackle as I and I was 30 away and got one. Some nights your chi is just not good enough I guess, no matter what you think you know.
Lastly, in another old saying that holds true as we percieve ourselves to be head and shoulders above the "average" casual surfcaster is that "the more you know the less you can be sure of". What that means is sometimes we tend to overthink a situation and in doind so confuse what is usually a very basic situation. I do that all the time and it always kicks me in the head.
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