Every angler has favourites.
Favourite pegs. Favourite methods. Favourite baits. Favourite distances. Favourite floats. Favourite lakes. The peg that always seems to produce. The method that feels natural in your hands. The bait that has caught you fish when nothing else would.
There's nothing wrong with favourites. They're built from real experience, real sessions, real fish. They exist for a reason.
The problem begins when they stop being preferences and start becoming assumptions.
Because the fish have never been informed that Peg 24 is your favourite peg. They haven't agreed to feed on your favourite method. And they certainly haven't consulted the recent catch reports before deciding what they want today.
How Favourites Are Born
Most favourites start honestly enough.
A memorable win. A personal best. A session where everything clicked — the peg produced, the method worked, the bait caught, and for a few hours the whole thing felt effortless. A positive association is formed, and there's nothing unusual or irrational about that. Experience is supposed to inform future decisions. That's the whole point of time on the bank.
The problem is that memory is powerful. Much more powerful than evidence.
Over time, the details fade. We stop remembering why something worked — the specific conditions, the wind direction, the time of year, the state of the water — and simply remember that it worked. The context disappears. The result remains. And gradually, without anyone making a conscious decision, the favourite stops being an informed preference and becomes something closer to a belief.
Beliefs don't ask questions. Evidence does.
The Dangerous Shift
At some point the favourite stops being an option and becomes a default.
The favourite peg is assumed to be good before the draw is even made. The favourite method goes in before the swim has been searched. The favourite bait gets fed before any evidence has been gathered about what the fish actually want today. The decision has already been made — back at home, or in the car park, or the moment the peg number was called out — and what follows on the bank is not fishing so much as executing a plan that was never based on present evidence.
The fish just haven't been consulted.
This shift is subtle and it happens to good anglers. It doesn't feel like complacency. It feels like confidence. It feels like arriving prepared, knowing your strengths, backing your experience. And sometimes it works — which is precisely what makes it dangerous. When a favourite delivers, it reinforces itself. When it doesn't, the angler tends to blame execution rather than question the approach. The belief stays intact. The evidence gets explained away.
The Peg Trap
Every fishery has them. The pegs everybody wants. The pegs that acquire reputations, that get whispered about in the car park, that people quietly hope for when the draw bag comes round.
But reputations are historical. Fish live in the present.
Today's wind. Today's temperature. Today's pressure. Today's stock behaviour. A famous peg can fish poorly when the conditions are wrong. An unfancied peg — one nobody wanted, one people shook their heads at in sympathy — can win a match comfortably when the conditions happen to suit it. The angler who arrives at any peg with an open mind, prepared to read what's in front of them, has a genuine advantage over the angler who arrives carrying assumptions.
Because assumptions close questions down. And open questions are exactly what the first hour of a session is for.
The Method Trap
This is where many anglers get caught in a way that's harder to see from the outside.
They become known — to themselves as much as anyone else — as a feeder angler, or a pole angler, or a pellet angler, or a margin angler. The identity forms around the method. And once that identity is established, it starts to exert a quiet pressure on every decision. Instead of asking what are the fish telling me, the question becomes how can I make my favourite method work today?
Those are very different questions. The first starts with the fish. The second starts with the angler. And only one of them leads to good decisions.
A Lesson From Signal Lake
I need to tell you about a session at Lodge Farm Fisheries. Signal Lake — right next to the railway lines, an open match, and a draw system where the fishery manager picks your peg for you based on the order you signed on.
I was nearly last to draw. Peg 1 was picked for me — an end peg, thirty metres across, with a long reed margin running all the way down the right side to the far bank. As people headed for their vans, several of them stopped to tell me I was going to bag up. End pegs at Signal are favoured. The additional cover, the reed line, the features. I'd drawn well, apparently.
I set up my favoured approach. Bomb, method feeder, pellet waggler. I was going with meat — because the word in the car park was that they'd been having meat for a few weeks, and why would you argue with that?
I fished the bomb and method to the far bank. I worked the right side margin. I tried the waggler. And for over three hours I had nothing. Not a bite. Not a liner. Not a single indication that a fish had come anywhere near the rig. The longer it went on, the harder it became to abandon the plan, because every minute invested made it feel as though success was just one cast away.
And here's the thing. In those three hours I became convinced it was me. That I was doing something wrong. That my presentation was off, or my depth was wrong, or I was feeding incorrectly. I ran through every possibility except the obvious one: that the approach itself was the problem, and the bait was the problem, and the fish on that day simply wanted something different.
My neighbour, a few pegs down, was catching well. Pole, close in, maggots. Steady and consistent all session. The evidence was visible the entire time — I just wasn't ready to act on it because acting on it would have meant dismantling everything I'd arrived with and starting again.
Somebody forgot to tell the fish I was using meat on the bomb and a method feeder. Hard pellets on the pole won the match that day. The fish weren't being difficult. They weren't refusing to cooperate with my plan. They simply didn't know my plan existed. They were doing what fish do — responding to conditions, to what was being presented to them, to what was happening in the water right now — and my plan had nothing to do with any of that.
I trapped myself. Not through bad technique, not through poor preparation, but through the quiet assumption that the approach I'd arrived with was the right one — and through the stubbornness that kept me fishing it long after the evidence was telling me otherwise.
Why Search-First Fishing Rejects Favourites
Search-First Fishing doesn't care what worked last week. It doesn't care what the car park consensus is, or what the recent catch reports say, or what method feels most natural in your hands. It cares about one thing: what is happening now.
Observation comes first. Evidence comes second. Decisions come third.
A favourite method may eventually become the correct answer on any given day — and when it does, it earns that position through evidence rather than loyalty. The Search-First angler who picks up their preferred rig after forty-five minutes of observation and concludes that it's the right tool for what the fish are communicating is in a completely different position to the angler who picked it up in the car park and never put it down. The rig might be identical. The decision behind it is entirely different.
One is a conclusion. The other is an assumption.
Function Over Favourite
This is the principle that runs through everything in the system, and it applies as much to decisions as it does to tackle.
Every item in a properly rationalised kit exists to perform a specific function. The float is chosen because its construction answers the question the session is currently asking. The hook is chosen because it suits the fish, the bait, and the conditions. Nothing is in the bag out of habit or sentiment — everything earns its place by doing a job that nothing else already does.
The same logic should apply to every decision on the bank.
A method should be chosen because it solves the current problem — not because it feels familiar. A bait should be chosen because it serves the current objective — not because it worked three weeks ago. A line should be chosen because the conditions demand it — not because it's the one that gets reached for automatically.
Function over favourite. Every time.
The Better Question
Instead of arriving at a peg and asking what's my favourite way to fish here, try asking what is this peg asking me to do?
One question starts with the angler. The other starts with the fish.
The first question has already decided the answer before the session has started. The second question can only be answered by watching, listening, and giving the peg the chance to speak before committing to anything. It's a harder question to sit with — because it doesn't come with the comfort of a ready-made plan — but it's the only question that leads to decisions grounded in what's actually happening rather than what's happened before.
The peg at Signal Lake was asking me to fish the pole close in with maggots. It was telling me that clearly, through the evidence visible right next to me, for three hours. I just wasn't asking the right question.
The Hardest Thing to Leave Behind
Favourite pegs are memories. Favourite methods are habits. Favourite baits are preferences.
Fish respond to none of them.
Fish respond to presentation, location, timing, and conditions. They respond to what is in the water in front of them right now — not to what caught them last month, not to what the car park said was working, not to what feels most natural to the angler on the other end of the pole.
The most successful anglers aren't those with the strongest favourites. They're the anglers most willing to abandon those favourites when the evidence tells them to. That willingness isn't a weakness. It isn't a lack of confidence or conviction. It's the highest form of confidence there is — the confidence to trust what the fish are telling you more than you trust what you arrived believing.
Good anglers fish their strengths. Great anglers fish the situation.
Function always beats favourite.
Christene Jayne Backhouse Going Fishing — going-fishing.co.uk