T o keep from spooking fish you must move your tube very slowly and quietly with long, motionless pauses. Watch the behavior of the cormorant and you will see that it never stops moving-it is constantly swimming or diving, landing or taking off. Bass are also alarmed by those sounds, but tend to react with caution rather than panic. F ish learn which disturbances represent danger and are even attracted by certain noises. Bass may feed close by swimmers or adjacent to heavily travelled powerboat lanes, but clamup and hide when they hear an electric trolling motor, an electronic signal from a depth sounder or the whirling blade on a spinner bait.
Big bream gather around public launching ramps despite the noisy activity.
People discard live bait and clean fish in these areas and the fish are rarely molested. The bream have learned that vehicles, outboard motors and rock-throwing youngsters do not represent a threat. After you catch a few, however, the situation changes dramatically. The Bank E very farm pond angler has seen the wakes of fish moving out of the shallows when he brazenly approaches the pond-sometimes when he is still a hundred or more feet away. While we all may prefer the comfort of our float tubes to the pain of crawling through thorny puckerbrush, it may be a luxury that, from a tactical viewpoint, we cannot afford.