BLOG: Narrowing your focus

The last few sessions have seen me on a kingie jigging rampage. I've been secretly trying for a metre plus fish and came within two centimetres of the prize. The best fished I jigged went 97cm and 98cm, both taken on consecutive drifts.

I knew the kingies were running and resisted the temptation on most days to be sidetracked by schools of surface fish that were spied whilst zooming through the Harbour. Narrowing my focus to jigging kings has seen me learn a great deal about my new boat, my new sounder while a number of new locations have been identified whilst exploring the deep blue.

I've become more familiar with schooling patterns and currents that are conducive to jigging kings - it's all well and good to have someone else take you out and learn by observation but nothing beats the experience learnt by doing it yourself.

Learning to fly-fish is another recent example of narrowing my focus to learn a new technique. At some stage I'm going to hit the water armed with a fly rod and nothing else - it annoys me that I haven't yet mastered fly and that frustration is evident when I put the fly rod down and start catching fish on a spin outfit.

On the days where I've left the spin rod at home and ventured out with fly only I haven't caught much (or anything really) and I come away from it extremely frustrated, but with improved casting skills and incremental improvement in confidence and ability.

Occasionally I'll take a scattergun approach and try for a raft of different species using varying techniques however a concerted effort on a single species.

Really narrowing your focus, will go a long way to optimising targeted success. Agreed?