Hi, I'm Jeremy Lawyer. I'm here with BassResource, and I wanna talk to you something that's really maybe not as important to others as some of you. And that's practicing when you're off the water. You know, that sounds kind of crazy, but if you think about it, you know, basketball players do it. Football players do it, baseball players do it. Any sport you wanna get better at, whether it's throwing cornhole bags or horseshoes or whatever it is, or bass fishing you need to practice. And you know, there's a few things that maybe I can pass along I've learned over the years in order to help you have a little bit more success with your off-the-water practice.
You know, I grew up standing on the porch of our house in town, little covered porch on the second step, which was about the same height as a bass boat. And I put me a couple of different coffee cans out there and I had one birdbath hole. And anyways, I would just sit around and practice my flipping and, you know, whether it was raining or anything, we didn't have cell phones. It was different, you know, we just had different times and it really got to where I enjoyed doing it. I got better at it. I wanted to learn to flip, you know, I wanted to be able to skip it underneath stuff, you know, and I think a lot of that has to do with how good you are at control. So you know pretty well the basics, you know, of trying to flip is just using more of your elbow and your wrist. You're not really using your arm. People think I use my arm and throw that out there. You really don't.
You just kinda let the bait do most of the work and you're just gonna pin on that rod and then land it. And the reason that you actually lift the rod up is for two reasons. One, it's gonna allow your bait to lay on the water or the ground quieter and you'll be able to tell when you're flipping in a coffee cup when you're getting better at it because it won't pling as hard or a coffee can or whatever you might have. And secondly, you're gonna give that bait a little bit of line so that way you have some slack. So when you put that in there and everything and it lands, then you got some line that slack line to fall the bait down with. And that'll weigh when a fish does hit on the fall, you can go ahead and be ready for him and set the hook.
But a few things that people I think do is one, they try to use way too much of their arm and push the bait out in front of them. I think they don't start with the bait of your choice, which this is a jig today, high enough above the reel. I think the higher it is, the shorter pendulum you have, and the more distance you can get, especially when you're first starting. Because if you have it way down here like this and then you try and do it, you pretty well hit the ground before you get started. So I think a good comfortable spot, depending on how long your arms are, how tall you might be, how long a rod you're using, and how much distance you want to get is to figure out if it needs to be, even with the reel, up the line, up the rod, whatever it might be to get that perfect distance to where you just use your arm and actually put that out there and use your elbow and your wrist. You just don't push the bait.
See, that's just the whole motion right there, like that. And a couple of other things as well is that if you'll have a little bit heavier bait to where it's gonna take less of your effort and more bait to actually spool the line off, it's gonna help you get started. If you try to just push it out there and it doesn't weigh anything, it's hard to spool off there. You know, when you're trying to decide how loose your tension is on your spool, that's gonna make a big player. So what I like to do, you've got to fine-tune cast control on the side of your reel if it's a very expensive reel and you can actually turn that dial to fine-tune it. But every reel has this knob right here and all you're gonna do is tighten that down. You can see right there, I've tightened it down. See how slow that falls? You can actually tighten that one more and it won't even go down. So you can't even get that bait to move.
So what I'm gonna start doing is I'm gonna push the button and then I'm gonna start loosening this. And when that thing starts falling at a rate that you're comfortable with, then you're gonna be able to flip without having to worry about backlashes and different things. I like to run mine very, very loose, but that's just because I've been doing it a while. So some of you newcomers, if you run at this loose and you make a flip and don't have everything under control, you're gonna backlash your reel pretty hard. If you're getting frustrated at doing that, this problem here by adjusting your cast control can definitely offset a lot of that headache. And what you're gonna find is as you get better at it, you're gonna loosen it a little more and a little more, then you're gonna fine-tune your braking system on your left side and it's gonna be one big setup in order to do it.
And so I think a guy just needs to be open-minded, try to use more of his arm and wrist, and elbow rather than pushing it, you know, trying to use like you would think you were throwing a ball because it's more of a pendulum system to actually get it out there. Focus on how your reel is set, have the correct weight of a bait out here. This is a five eighths-ounce jig that you could just flip anything. It can be just a regular sinker, but I like to use a bait that's gonna be real similar, something that you're gonna flip, and then it's just gonna take repetition, you know, it's just all there is to it. So hopefully be open-minded, have some patience, set your gear up this way, and hopefully that'll help you have time to practice off the water and it's gonna make you a better angler on the water.
