If you clicked on this story thinking it's a how-to about dealing with fishing pressure, you're maybe 33% correct. This is mostly a venting session filled with observations and atrocities I witness each season. Fishing for a partial living is far from glamorous, and with it comes a lot of dirt if you know where to look. This short will likely lead to a much larger story in the future, but for now it's just a rambling of thoughts, opinions, and using this platform to help the fishing world do better. I might not make friends through this either.   Exploitation Fishing pressure is a fact of life. Conditioning is a byproduct of it. As fish grow educated, they develop a bunker mentality with everyone’s baits whizzing past them. Could you blame them? As smallmouths age, and are repeatedly caught and released, they learn not to strike certain lures. We see this all the time on pressured waters. On these types of fisheries, smallmouths are neutral to negative. Non-committal on one presentation, but then captured with a follow-up or throwback bait instead. Perhaps the specimen had a few painful experiences getting hooked, or was greatly mishandled by a