It seems that most people flip or pitch jigs to targets. What is the advantage to pitching to the shore line versus simply positioning the boat so that you can hop the jig across in from of the goal areas? The areas are individual patches of algae and debris that have bass hiding up underneath.

Is there an advantage? Is there a paticular set of circumstances where casting parallel is a better option?

Thanks.

The purpose of Flipping and Pitching is to eliminate as much splashdown as possible and to achieve pinpoint accuracy.

The importance of a quiet entry is to keep the element of surprise. The majority of bass are caught by reaction strikes due to being surprised by a falling lure. Experts say 80 to 90% of the time. The more you can surprise them the better chance you have of catching them. If you spook them with sometimes even the slightest splash you can forget catching them.

Bass relate to structure 99.9% of the time. They like the shade and will hold tight to anything that gives them a place to hide and ambush their prey. Many times their strike zone is very small. The closer you can get your lure to it's mouth the better chance you have of getting it to open. This requires pinpoint accuracy. Denny Brauer, perhaps the best flipper of all times usually looks for the muddiest water he can find on a lake. Muddy water will cause a fish to hold so tight to cover that it will be touching it. Denny then looks for things like logs, stumps and rocks and tries to hit every inch of them with a jig. Feeling for the strikes on the fall. If he doesn't get the strike on the fall, he pulls it back in and flips again, sometime dozens of time at the same stump.

So the importance of Flipping and Pitching and so great you can't afford not to master it. You should get to the point that you can land your lure into a coffee cup every time with very little bounce or noise.

Personally it has increased my catch rate by 60% and I am catching better quality fish.

Oh, I forgot to talk about the circumstances you asked about.

This all has to do with patterning the fish. One day I was fishing a lake that was about 9 feet above full pool. There were great looking trees and stickups and even a few picnic tables to toss a jig at. I could have tossed a C-rig or a spinnerbait all day through this stuff and caught a few fish. But the best pattern for that day was short trees with green leaves in the water from main lake points no more than 150 yards back into the coves. Because the fish were holding to something specific it required a pinpoint cast. Therefore I was Pitching all day. I chose to pitch because it was clear water and I needed to back off a bit.

A few month ago I was cruising along in some very clear water and looking down along a very well defined grass line in 8 ft of water while trying to find bedding fish in very shallow water. I noticed that I kept spooking fish out of this grass line. So I backed off and started throwing a C-Rig Parallel the Grass and caught 12 fish and about 25 casts. I caught fish all day long by moving back and forth along the grass in this area. The fish weren't in a specific spot they were in an area. Therefore requiring long cast and parallel retrieve.