Breaking habits

It’s easy to get into a “rut” when fishing. A lure or technique produces fish, so it’s your primary choice each time you go out and you stick with it, even if it’s not producing fish because conditions have changed.
It’s easiest to explain in terms of bass fishing (and something that happened to me recently).
I’ve been catching most of my fish this year on lightly-weighted Senko-type baits pitched around cover; generally a shallow-water technique. But when the recent heat wave shot surface water temperatures up to 90 degrees and higher and the bass went into a “funk,”
Without going into a discussion of why bass do this, simply note that I continued to pitch the stickbaits. Oh, I tried other things -- buzzbaits, surface plugs, spinnerbaits, deep-diving crankbaits, vibrating baits, tubes, a Carolina rig. But if there was a piece of visible cover, the first thing I threw at it was usually the stickbait. Nothing worked.
I realize there was a lot of that going on Sunday at Seneca. It seemed like it was one of those day when, if you’re lucky, you eventually drop a lure in the right place at the right timer and hook a keeper.
Still, when I got off the water, I had the feeling that I had stayed with the stickkbait far too much that day; that I had not reacted well to the tough conditions presented -- That I had stayed in the rut when I needed to veer out of it.
The question isn’t what lure or technique I should have used. That’s almost irrelevant. The question is why did I persist in doing what clearly wasn’t working? And why did I not try two techniques that clearly would have been worth trying: Throwing a suspending jerkbait around schools of baitfish or panfish (which I did find) or crawling a heavy jig or worm down a point?
Instead I stuck to the same pattern of crankbats and Carolina rigs on points, Senkos and spinnerbaits around cover,
It may have to do with the fact that from April through June, in all conditions, two things have accounted for most of the fish I have caught this year -- stickbaits and spinnerbaits. It’s hard to switch from what has been working best.
You have to remain flexible. You may go to a lake expecting one thing to work, and although persistence sometimes is rewarded, you have to respond to conditions as you find them. Not as you hoped them to be.
Reading conditions and adapting to them is something we have all tried to learn since the first day we took up the pursuit of bass (or any other fish). Sometimes, though, we seem to forget the lessons we’ve learned.
Luckily, fishermen are eternal optimists. The next trip will be better.