Bill Siemantel is the shrewdest angler I've ever met. He specializes in catching trophy fish, and has arguably boated more monster bass than anyone else on earth. His tally includes 300 largemouth weighing more than 10 pounds, 41 topping 13 pounds and 12 over 15. And while this tally may be staggering, it's his unique approach that's most impressive.


When other anglers rock, Siemantel rolls. When they zig, he zags. And while his bestselling book, Big Bass Zone, and video, Swimbait Techniques, focus on bass, the concepts and theories he espouses are just as applicable-and maybe even more so-to giant muskies, pike, walleye, lake trout and salmon. This is particularly the case when it comes to his philosophy on selecting lures to match what the big fish are eating.

Whether the walleye are feasting on smelt, the bass are dining on crayfish or the muskies are gorging on suckers, most anglers reckon it's enough to simply select a corresponding lure. More progressive anglers may even believe they've taken things a step further if they match the hatch with a hard-to-find, custom-painted lure that looks as though it could swim right out of your hands.

That's all fine as far as it goes, which isn't very far, the way Siemantel sees it. "If it looks like one," he says of a lure that resembles a particular bait, "it better behave like one." In other words, it's not enough to select a lure that resembles the bait the fish are eating-you have to make it act like the bait, too. This is a brilliant concept many anglers fail to consider.

Take big pike, for example. They're ambush predators that like to cozy up along the outside edges of deep weedlines or behind large boulders to pounce on their prey. So you'd think if you threw a natural-looking lure in such areas you'd start reeling in the trophies. Not necessarily.

According to Siemantel, you have to make the lure behave like the herring, smelt, whitefish or walleye it represents as you retrieve it along the weedline. In this case, you need to swim the lure nonchalantly toward the most prominent point sticking out of the weedline-where a giant gator is most likely hiding-then make it suddenly and erratically veer away from the ambush spot as though it's fleeing in fright.

Further to the point, how you retrieve the same lure will differ depending on where you're fishing it, says Siemantel, whether it's in open water, on the surface, in the middle of the water column or close to bottom. And you need to visualize, then mimic, how a baitfish swims when it's alone in the middle of a lake, or how it behaves when it's a member of a huge school. Out on a stroll by itself, a baitfish swims in a lazy, straight-ahead manner. As a member of a much bigger school, however, that same baitfish will be darting and dashing erratically all over the place. It's still behaving naturally, but in a completely different way
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Siemantel says trophy fish recognize these variances and will attack or avoid lures depending on how well they replicate the real thing. The best anglers capitalize on this, and with more double-digit bass to his credit than anyone else, Siemantel, for one, has the results to back up the theory.

How to act

Ready to put pro angler Bill Siemantel's ideas on bait mimicry into practice? No doubt you'll come up with numerous ways to make your lures more lifelike, but here are a few ideas to get you started.

>>When you're casting a crawfish-coloured lure for bass, continually bang it into the bottom.
>>When you're trolling for walleye in the middle of the water column, choose a minnowbait with a tight or moderate wobble over one that's highly erratic.
>>If you spot a single log, boulder or object around which you think a big fish is lurking, slowly saunter a lure up to within striking distance of it, then dramatically alter the angle of your retrieve. And hang on.