Rob good write-up on fishing fast-slow. That explains a lot when I hear about the complaints of the amateurs on the pro-am tournamenst on how it sucks most of the time when fishing with a pro.

My question is, do you and anyone else use the fast-slow technique while fishing swimbaits? From the thought that I've put into it, it seems like a pretty failsafe way to fish them for consistant bites if you know the big fish areas and structures in the lake that your fishing....right?

I haven't had the most success with big fish regardless of what I'm fishing yet to know the consistant "big fish spots" on most of the lakes that I fish. But with time I will hopefully establish more knowledge about fishing fast-slow itself when necessary as well as big fish knowledge.

Thanks for the help. Steve.

Do I do this kind of deal with swimbaits - you bet. Does it work very often? Nope! But you know, if I fish 50 times a year, I might hit 6 or 8 days where the fish are really biting swimbaits and a few of those trips I might be able to run the lake and do this kind of fast-slow thing on them.

I'm just looking for those days when I roll up on my first spot and get mowed right away ... and conditions are totally money (things like pre-front, clouds, south wind, etc). And then I go to the next spot and get mowed there too. When you get easy bites right off the bat - those are the situations where you can start running the lake and picking off fish. It might last for an hour, or sometimes if you're really lucky it might last all day.

With small fish (like tournament fishing) bites like this are probably almost always available at any given lake. Small fish pattern pretty frequently and tourney guys especially in big tournaments will inevitably figure this stuff out. If you read Robert Lee's interviews about how he won the Delta Bassmasters over and over, he was totally fishing like this. He knew his water extremely well and how it all layed out under water. He'd run up on a spot, make the best possible casts, and then move on. People might say - oh man he fishes fast, but he's really fishing fast-slow because he knows exactly where to cast. Another one that comes to mind is Scott Martin's win on lake Champlain. He had hundreds of bedding smallmouth marked on GPS and he just ran those fish day after day to get them. Same idea except that he could see the fish to mark them.

So by no means am I saying this is my #1 of getting big fish, far from it. It's just something to keep in mind so you can take advantage of it when the conditions come along. Plus dude, you gotta have real water to fish to pattern fish like this. Fishing small bowl shaped lakes with only 1 or 2 points or coves - you're probably never going to pattern fish on specific cover, because if fish are on points or in coves what are you going to do, fish both points and both coves? That's just silly :) You oughtta try to look for this stuff at places like San V or Otay, where it's actually likely to happen, not at Poway or Dixon or whatevers.

Anyway, hope that makes some sense.