This is the
March 1010 installment of the The Duckett Exchange, a regularly scheduled column about competitive fishing. Written by Boyd Duckett, a former Bassmaster Classic champion and the all-time B.A.S.S. single-season earnings leader, the column addresses issues and trends that affect anglers at every level of competition. In addition to competing on the ESPN Elite Series Tour, Duckett is also a popular a public speaker and successful businessman. He is the owner of Southern Tank Leasing, an Alabama-based company with terminals all over the Southeast and Midwest, and Duckett Fishing, a rod manufacturing company that produces MICROMagic rods. His pro fishing Web/Blog site can be found at
www.boydduckett.com.
What do you do if you’re a tournament angler and you have two bad events in a row? Is it time to panic?
No.
Is it time to change your approach?
Well, yes and no.
It would be nice if you never had to face this question. It certainly wasn’t the question I hoped to face starting the 2010 Elite Series season. But it’s the place I find myself starting this season. Two bad events in a row.
It’s not an uncommon problem for anglers, no matter what level you find yourself at. I’ve had to deal with the question in the past, and now here it is again. I’ve started the season with two sub-par events. I had near-the-bottom finishes at the Bassmaster Classic on Lay Lake, a body of water I know well, and the first Elite Series event in the California Delta, water I’m not familiar with.
I never got on the fish at either place. In fact, I left the Delta not feeling any more confident after two days of tournament fishing than I felt five days earlier when we started practicing.
I just never found them, and I wasn’t alone. But that doesn’t make me or anybody else feel any better. Misery doesn’t necessary love company.
The basic question
So, back to the major question I’m staring at: Is there a reason to change anything?
In this case, the answer is no, and here’s why.
The first thing an angler should do after two bad events is analyze what went wrong. As obvious as that might seem, it’s the first step toward keeping a proper perspective and not letting yourself get rattled.
During the first two events of our season, there were guys catching them and guys not catching them. The reason for that is that the fish were only biting in small areas, and not everybody is going get access to those areas. I sure wasn’t fishing them.
When I think about the Classic, I’m still kicking myself for not being among the anglers to camp out in Beeswax Creek, because that was the only place on Lay Lake that had a consistent bite. But I didn’t start there, and when I realized what was happening, it was too late to crash the party.
It was an odd thing at Lay Lake how the water temperature in one area was a few degrees warmer than the rest of the lake, but that was the story of the tournament.
A similar thing happened at the Delta. The colder-than-normal winter put the fish on a different pattern, and if you didn’t hit on the right areas – and there weren’t many – you were left out. We had cold and wind and tides to deal with. John Crews fished a great tournament. So did Skeet. John actually won the event when he found a spot where the water was deep enough that the tides didn’t have much of an effect.
But overall, there were a limited number of areas that produced bites. There were a lot of zeroes and one-fish days in the Delta for a lot of anglers.
Keeping composed when the going is tough
Now we go to another California body of water. We’re heading to Clear Lake, a reservoir in Northern California that’s famous for giving up giant fish. Steve Kennedy won the Elite Event three years ago when he bagged almost 123 pounds. That’s four days averaging more than 30 pounds a day, so that’s some serious fish.
As simple as this sounds, what I’ve got to do now is just keep my head and go fishing.
If I had been on familiar lakes, with conditions that created an equal playing field, and I wasn’t catching fish, then I would be awfully concerned. In that case, it would be time to talk about changing baits, switching strategies, re-thinking everything I’ve been doing. But that’s not the case.
I’ve spent time in the past on this Duckett Exchange talking about how important it is to try new areas and approaches. I’ve always encouraged anglers to get out of their comfort zones and figure out how to catch fish in different water and different conditions. We should all change what we’re occasionally to make ourselves more diversified anglers.
In my case, I might have to do some of that this week at Clear Lake. I might have to consider a few new strategies. I won’t really know for sure until we start the tournament on Thursday. The cold weather will still be an issue, but we’re heading to a lake where the fish are likely going to be moving and biting.
But generally, I think I should take the opposite approach. Instead of creating new game plans, I’ve got to just forget all the scrambling I had to do the past two tournaments. Forget the searching and searching I had to do to see if I could get to an area where there was any kind of bite. And most of all, I have to keep my mind free of the frustration that creeps in when nothing, and I mean nothing, is working.
Now it’s time to get back to basics. There’s no need to change strategy at this point. I have to simply go find the fish and the catch them. Use the tools and the knowledge that I have in my bag and make it work.
