Many valuable lessons are to be learned from each trip on the water. Here is how I approached a recent tournament and how prefishing guided my way.

 Before my last tournament I visited the lake three different times before the off limits period. In each of those three trips I managed to catch only one bass. That may sound like a real failure to some but to me it was a positive sign that I was eliminating useless water. Pre fishing to me is a matter of being able to learn from what the water throws at you and sometimes it throws nothing! That to can be very valuable in the process of finding a bag of fish.

As I launched my boat on the official practice day before the tournament I remembered the three previous trips and how the bass had handed me a good butt kicking. I smiled and said to myself, “Not today”. I then ran to my first spot a whole 1/2 mile from the luanch where I believed the better fish were holding. This area held a thick mat of hydrilla and under that hydrilla was a sharp drop from 2ft to 6ft. This type of water and cover was abundant throughout the river but many overlooked the small cove so close to the launch. This area also held large amounts of baitfish and fry from the spawn and during the mid day hours it had plenty of shade from the nearby Oaks.

I started the day at about 10:30 throwing a Gitem Toad to the mats. This resulted in a 4.lber right off the bat. Two more casts another big fish busts on the frog. That gives me all the knowledge I will need for that spot. I now know that by using the frog as a search bait I can catch these fish flipping those mats. I left the fish to be for the next day and found a secondary location of the same type vegetation. It also produced. Then for good measure I went looking for fish in the headwaters where I found a plethora of small keeper size fish in case I needed them.

On tournament day I caught those fish under the mats by flipping. A solid limit and six place finish. My point being do not let so called bad days on the water discourage you from maintaining focus on finding fish. If you want to make it in tournament fishing you have to be willing to learn non stop! Never give up!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Fishing Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.