In this installment, Ike gives his opinion of how boat traffic affects fishing in busy urban waters.

So many of us live in or near cities. So many of us who love to fish wait until we have at least a few free days, then travel long distances to fish. But we should stop waiting and get fishing smack in the urban jungle!

As Ike’s exclusive MidWest Outdoors column returns for a second year, anything having to do with urban fishing and bank fishing is fair game. We hope you feel inspired and prepared to fish the streets of your city.

MidWest Outdoors: When we left off last month, you were talking about whether fish that live in urban environments get used to a lot of traffic around them and just keep eating and living their life amidst all the commotion.

Mike Iaconelli: I’ve seen it both ways, but more often than not I’ve seen boat traffic actually help the bite, because it creates current and that positions the bait differently. Often, the fish can actually feed better as a result.

MWO: Do you look for places where currents are created by boat traffic and fish those areas?

Ike: Oh yeah, I love it; I love high-traffic areas, and a lot of what I’m talking about are no-wake zones, where boats are coming in and out at a slow, steady speed. Where boats are blowing by, putting 20-foot wakes up, that’s different. That doesn’t help the fishing. The fish that live there are used to it, and their locations become predictable. And the most amazing thing is that those fish don’t get fished, because nobody thinks about fishing right where the traffic is. I cannot count the number of tournaments I’ve done well in over the years where I targeted those areas.

MWO: Wow, so even for bass fishing from a boat, when you could fish anyplace you want?

Ike: Yes. Lake St. Clair would be a good example. Some of my best finishes have come from those bottleneck areas, where the other anglers said, “Oh my God, this is horrible, I gotta get out of here.”

MWO: So your city-fishing, shore-fishing experiences give you an advantage in those cases.

Ike: Absolutely. City fishing, when you look at a piece of water, things are different from city to city but they’re also the same. In a natural environment you’ve got weeds and logs and all these things, and those same things are present in a city environment, plus manmade cover and objects that fish learn to live in and around. Shade lines, curve breaks, undercuts, a sea wall that goes for a mile but in one spot there’s a drain that has a gravel pile in front of it.

It’s the same stuff we’ve been reading about from the Lindners for 30 years. What you have in its most basic form is the same up at Lake of the Woods as what you find in Philadelphia.

MWO: With increased human pressure and the potential that city fish become more wary, on balance does that causes you to downsize lures, or do you sometimes even go bigger than normal, or is it hard to summarize your approach to presentation?

Ike: In city fishing, three things ring true and they also carry over to fishing in more natural environments. First one, and I see this over and over, especially last year when filming Fish My City, is match the hatch. The overriding premise of all fishing, for me, is to try to show them something that looks and behaves like something they are already eating.

MWO: In situations when you don’t keep a fish, cut it open and examine its stomach contents, how do you go about determining what they’re eating?

Ike: So in Fish My City, first thing I’d do when the production crew was setting up microphones and camera angles, I’m down on the bank observing, turning over rocks, looking to see what kind of insects are in that system. I’m looking for baitfish and what size and color they are. Anything to better understand what kind of food is in there.

The second part is research. I knew what cities I was going to in advance, so I was able to Google and find out generally what kind of fish we could catch and how people fish in those places.

Third, I fished with really good local guys who dialed me in to what those fish were feeding on. It would be one of the first questions I would ask them: What are these fish feeding on? What’s their forage?

MWO: And you would have a bunch of lures and baits and trailers in your backpack so you could put together a presentation right there that should work, right?

Ike: That was one of the hardest things, and [his wife] Becky and I figured a system out before I left for the first trip to film that show. How do you bring everything you might need without bringing way too much stuff?

I used two Flambeau packs, one being a really big travel bag into which I put a lot of stuff but a little bit of everything. Lures that could fish from top to bottom, from big to small, a lot of colors. Then I would pack my backpack out of that big bag before each day of fishing, trying to anticipate what I would need.

The same approach works any day you’re going fishing in a city environment. That’s how I do it: I try to figure out what those fish are eating, then come up with something that gets those fish to bite, especially the pressured ones.

When it comes to dialing in the presentation, two things ring true: finesse or speed. Speed was so key in a lot of those shows and it is for any of my city fishing.

MWO: Speed of your presentation, right?

Ike: Right. Speed of presentation.

MWO: Great spot to stop for now. Let’s talk speed in more detail next month.

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