Have you been in a slump lately? Fishing hasn’t been so hot?  Or have you been only catching dinks?  Well, consider it time to revisit your honey-hole.

Your honey-hole.  Everyone should have one.  A place where it seems you can almost do no wrong, a place where terrible fishing is forgiven, lack of presentation doesn’t matter, where every lure seems to work atleast once.  And most important, a place where you can build your confidence back up.

During late fall, most winter anglers start bringing out their ice fishing gear, start playing with new lures and plastics, and most importantly keeps pulling in fish that are starting to act finicky.  As the cold starts coming, fish seem to be hunkering down for winter by slowing down on their feeding.  They still feed, but they just are not going to go after that big meal and exert that extra energy.  That is where your winter gear and practicing new lures and bait becomes important.  Those small lures are an easy snatch for a lazy fish, so let’s find out what they like while it’s still nice out!

But let’s say you missed out on that testing period, now what?  That honey-hole still has all the fish you love to catch, time to go see what they like and put a few on the ice.  We know the honey-hole isn’t pressured like bigger lakes, we know where they like to hide.  No problem, drill baby drill and get to fishing already!  Time to get you out of the slump, try a few new things, and build that confidence back up.

Don’t have a honey-hole?  Then it’s time to find you one.  One place I like to go to build confidence is Bacon Creek in Sioux City.  I usually only fish Bacon Creek in the winter, mainly because some of the best spots is back in the creek area, and it’s very hard to bank-fish in the creek area.  But the reason I choose Bacon Creek is because of the Iowa DNR trout releases they have.  That’s 3000 trout they release, 1500 in the fall release and 1500 in the winter release, which usually are swimming around the lake aggressively all winter long.  So I go out and try new spots on Bacon Creek, targeting other species of fish, such as crappie or blue gills or perch, but no matter where I fish I usually am guaranteed to hook into a few of those rainbow trout whether I want to keep them or not.  Confidence renewed!

Once you get your confidence renewed, it’s game on for more exploring, finding those trophy fish or finding fish to fill your dinner table.  Remember, there will always be a few bad days, it is after all called “fishing” and not “catching”.  But with a honey-hole in your back pocket, you always have a place to fall back on to have some fun and to regain your confidence!