This fall I tried some Inline spinners I have laying around for years. I targeted white bass and they seemed pretty effective, so I tried for walleye at night and that worked there as well, anyone use them for crappie?

I was reading an article where the author said he used them as his go to lure 30 years ago. Apparently everyone favored them for wide variety of fish where he fished as a kid in Minnesota. His claim was that over time they became ineffective. Seems to me if what he says is true, big if, then better lures came along, fish learn to avoid certain lures, fish feeding habits have changed, or something I can't think of.

People are always saying how stupid fish are but they do learn. We have a goldfish pond and my wife feeds them by hand but they wouldn't come near me. Wife told me to start feeding them and over time I would be able to hand feed them, sure enough she was right. Now I'm not an ethologist and I recognize that my antidote does not qualify as a scientific study. What seems obvious to me however is that it is only common sense to not underestimate your prey.

It is pretty common wisdom to look at what works for other people and imitate it. The most successful people however are the ones that do something different of course the same is true of the least successful. If you could fish everyday experimentation would be practical but for most of that is not an option. Imitation becomes about the best most of us can do. The problem is there are so many successful fishing methods available today. My experience has been that different methods worth best on specific lakes. One of the reasons I suspect is fishing pressure.

I read a study years ago that the same bass are caught over and over. Some bass were never caught. It seems that not only are fish "smarter" than we thought they also have "personality". We don't catch fish by just appealing to their senses, they are not machines they have brains. How do you think like a fish to reduce the amount of experimentation you have to engage in? Especially to catch the fish other people are not catching.