Catching the fish is easy, it has been said, once you find out where they are. How true! Captain Mann had built his knowledge base and could predict where the fish would be every trip out. Maybe that's the reason he was the most popular charter guide down there. Even the other guides were in awe at times.
You may not be able to take a full two years off to fish your home area every day, but you can be more successful than you are currently. Just start keeping a log. There are a number of fishing logs on the WEB, but you really don't need one if you have any kind of relational database management software. Even a spreadsheet will work.
I use Access 2000 because I have it, but there are others that will do fine. I simply built a database with all the pertinent information about tides, time, weather, season, bait, place, and type of fish caught. I can query on any of it and determine what I need to do. And the best part is, the more I input to it, the more reliable it becomes.
If I were going snapper fishing tomorrow, I would run a query on snapper, off the Texas Coast, in cold weather behind a front. What I would get is a report of all the trips that fit that criteria and I could determine from that, what tide I need to be fishing and what kind of bait will or won't work. Eventually that database would be accurate enough (assuming I fished enough!) to put me on fish a majority of the time.
I would never profess to be as good as old Captain Mann, but with computers and database software, its a lot easier for me than it was for him. Try it yourself and see if you don't start seeing some patterns - even some you never thought possible! I still wonder, though, what ever happened to Captain Mann's old paper logs.....
