EricM - You've got it tough man :) When I said there's some lakes where followers simply never bite, I was referring to the small lakes up here. The smaller the lakes, the faster the fish learn and get conditioned to each new bait. At a place like Poway where you have quite a bit of talent throwing big baits, those fish are just going to be smart and hard to catch, period. I fished Poway a few times and experienced exactly what you are describing. Tons of followers, no biters.

The one advantage you have from shore is that you can stand further back from the water's edge, and at least give yourself the opportunity to get those last minute bites before the fish turn off. If 9 out of 10 guys stand right at the water's edge casting, you might get that occasional bite by standing 30-50 feet back. Maybe you're already doing that and still not getting bit. Then you have to resort to all the sneaky moves like hook hiding, lighter line, modified baits, etc. There's no magic in this stuff.

Doug from Dallas - When you read Bill's book, it's important to put his advice in perspective. You probably haven't fished at Casitas, the Lagoon, and upper Castaic lake, but that is primarily where Bill fishes. At Casitas especially, fish will chase, and often times actually hit, right at the boat.

I've fished that lake about a dozen days in the past few years and totally seen it happen where fish will rush the bait and strike 5 feet from the side of the boat. The guys who fish there talk about it as if it's completely normal. Guys at Casitas talk about having fish jump up and grab baits that were dangling from rod tips over the side of the boat. Guys talk about getting hit at the boat, jerking the bait, and having the bait land on the other side of the boat - then getting hit over there by a different fish!

Maybe that kind of stuff will happen for you in Texas, I really have no idea, but to me it's a one-off deal that is specific to Casitas. It's not as if the fish at Casitas are stupid, they just have a collective lack of fear of boats to the point where many of them will use the boat to pin the 'trout'.

There are no lakes in Nor-Cal where I regularly get bit at the side of the boat, and I've never caught one on a figure 8. To paint the picture, at Don Pedro lake I've caught dozens and dozens of 5-13lb bass on swimbaits in 15-20 foot water clarity - and I saw maybe 2 or 3 of them eat it. Those fish that I saw eat it were small ones. The big ones never hit close to the boat. You're lucky to even meter the big fish at Pedro because they swim away from the boat as you go over. I know this because I've spent the time to cut sharp turns over key areas at high speed and I've seen the fish on the meter. If you come back and slowly move across the area on the trolling motor, you don't see them.

When you compare places like Casitas and Don Pedro, you can see how it's hard to offer catch-all advice (like use a figure 8 retrieve) for big fish. The only thing I know for sure that works is getting as far away from the fish as possible and doing it as quietly as possible. There's no scenario where this constitutes bad advice. From there your approach should be the result of trial and error at your particular lake. For each lake, you need to learn what works in each condition such as: wind, cloud, time of year, water temp, water clarity. Then you need to learn the combinations of conditions that cause good bites to happen, and within that you need to learn which spots bite on which conditions.

You can do all kinds of things to try to elicit a bite like jerking the bait, killing the bait, figure 8-ing or whatever but what really will get you bit is understanding the lake, knowing where to be at what time, with what bait. If you are trying to figure out how to get individual following bass to bite, I would politely suggest that you are focusing on the wrong things.