Pro Tips Weekly: Jimmy Houston

Making a pitch for practice

One of the best ways to spend your spare time in the offseason is to learn how to pitch a lure or cast underhand or sidearm underhand.

When you’re going more for accuracy than distance, pitching or using an underhand cast is the best choice. Also, pitching or using the underhand cast is a much more time-efficient way of presenting a lure to bass. Keeping the lure low to the water rather than giving it a high arcing trajectory with an overhand cast saves a lot of wasted time between casts. By the end of the day, you can make more casts than just by lobbing those high overhand casts. Of course, if you’re fishing shallow water, pitching a lure so that it makes a soft landing on the surface is also much more stealthy and less likely to spook fish.

Once you get comfortable pitching a lure, train yourself to do it without having to hold the lure or hook. It’s best to keep your scent off the bait. Sometimes you need every edge you can get.

— Chevy pro Jimmy Houston of Cookson, Okla.