Making Fishing Decisions During a Downswing | Florida, Classic, Santee

What you doing? Right now we are taking the line off of a lot of these reels. We're over here on Santee Cooper and we are fishing for very large bass and we're downsizing our line on a couple of these rods. Got a phone call. Spinning reel's ready. Flipping rod's ready. Jerk bait. Flipping rod. That's a frog rod right there so let's look at this one. Santee Cooper. Starts in the morning. It's been tough. I'm hoping they come to where I need them to come to because it ain't been real easy to catch them. I don't know. We'll see. I mean I'm kind of nervous about this one. I'm not going to play it smart which maybe I should but I'm not. We'll see how it goes. If I can generate enough bites I think I can catch a good bag but I mean on Santee Cooper if you catch 10 fish you're going to have a good bag. It's just hard to do that so I guess I'm going to gamble. I guess I'm going to gamble a little bit and try to try to make some waves I guess. I don't know. Hopefully we could at least if it if it doesn't go well I'm really hoping we can at least salvage it and end up having a decent tournament even if it goes poorly. So I'm not planning on it going poorly though. I'm hoping we can catch them early get off to a really good start and it'll be good. I don't know what you guys see. Do you feel a lot of pressure going into this tournament because of your last two? No I can't. I don't know if it's possible for me to feel more pressure going into these tournaments because I put so much pressure on myself naturally. I want to do so well in these tournaments that I just try to be as prepared as possible. I just always try to control everything I can possibly control. Make good decisions you know and see what happens. All right guys what's going on rigging right now for Santee. We have an off day on this one which is pretty cool. We don't have an off day too often but we do have an off day on this one and we are rigging trying to get everything ready. You know obviously it's no secret had two very bad tournaments to start my season. Had my two had my worst finish ever at St. John's which was really bad so then I had my second worst finish ever at Harris back to back. It's my third year on the elites. Had my two worst finishes ever back to back. So you know the thought process going into the third tournament is not going to change at all. So that's what we're kind of I kind of want to talk about a little bit was how to deal and how to get over with those tough things happening. I ain't got over it yet. We're still doing very bad in points. We're still going to have to try see what we can do to get over it but I mean it's the same exact thought process. You control everything you can possibly control. You don't over adjust. You know like I've had some good tournaments on the elites. I've had a really lucky really fortunate career on the elites so you don't want to over correct. That's a very important thing is you don't want to over correct just because you had a couple of bad results and you want to keep the same thought process. You know I've had a lot of good tournaments in Florida had two bad ones. You don't want to think that hey every time I've ever fished Florida I did it wrong because that's just not true. You're going to have bad results from time to time no matter how much you control or how good of decisions you make or whatever. You're going to have bad results occasionally and that's kind of what you know you have to realize going into something like competitive fishing is sometimes bad stuff's just going to happen point blank period. It's just going to and you just want to keep doing the same thing you're doing that got you here. Control everything you can. Make good decisions. Try the best you can to execute and not lose any and be extremely prepared for these tournaments and then just you know hope you have a positive result. That's just a fact of the matter. You know that's all you can do. You know like I can't control where exactly a fish swims or if a fish bites or if he don't or if he looks at and he almost bites then he don't bite. I can't control none of that stuff. All I can do is put my bait in front of as many bass as I possibly can. Give them opportunity to bite it and when they bite it I have opportunity to catch them. So same thought process and that's that goes with everything in life. You know sometimes bad stuff just happens. You keep working hard. You keep going and you try dig yourself out of whatever hole you got into and if you don't dig yourself all the other hole oh well. You just continue to progress. Continue to get better and that's my only goal. I want to stay on the elites for as long as I possibly can and I want to continue to improve for the rest of my life. I want to be a better fisherman in five years than I am right now. I don't want to be the same. I want to be a better fisherman after this tournament than I am right now. So that's kind of the thought process that I have and that's just kind of the way that I'm dealing with a downswing in bass fishing. You know I've dealt with a lot of downswings in fishing before. I've dealt with a lot of downswings in poker. Dealt with downswings in life. Sometimes stuff just happens like that and you know just a positive outlook. Making good decisions will get you out of almost everything you ever get into. So you know that's that's kind of what we're trying to do this week. Make good decisions and catch us some dadgum bass and they need to be about that dang long. So I'm hoping I'm hoping we can do it. What do you think you did? Do you think you did anything wrong or do you think you made bad decisions or do you think you got unlucked? St. John's. I don't know what happened. I fished. I went back and looked at the footage. I thought back on it. I fished pretty good I feel like. I honestly feel like I fished pretty good at St. John's. I just didn't get any bites. Like I don't know what else to say. I just didn't get any bites. I fished through some really good areas. I don't know. I don't know what happened. And then Harris Chain. I made some mistakes on Harris Chain. Made some time management mistakes. Wasted some time in some bad areas. Wasted some time on some bed fish that I knew probably were not going to bite and that bit me in the butt. But you know Harris Chain was one of those ones too where I was a late boat number in a bed fishing tournament. All the ones I went to somebody was already on them at first. Then I went to another area and kind of beat around and caught me a few three pounders you know out of this other area where I was bed fishing and ended up with 13 pounds which is not good by any stretch. But you know I just I never stumbled across a big one. I bed fished almost the entire day. Caught some fish. Caught a limit early. Culled a lot. I just never found one of those big ones that would bite. So on day two I decided to just fish a little bit more and I didn't bed fish much. What little bit I did bed fish. I mean it just didn't come together. And then whenever I was just fishing I didn't catch them. Like you know I didn't get any bites hardly. I caught some. You know you're gonna lose some here and there. I lost some on every tournament. But you know that's just that's just how it goes. On Harris Chain I wasted a little bit of time. I made a couple of bad decisions. That being said I had 16 hours of fishing time. I probably wasted two and a half three hours you know. So I still had 13 or 14 really good hours of fishing time during that tournament and I still didn't catch them. So maybe I decided to stay in some areas that are just not quite as good as I thought they were. I'm not really sure. But regardless we didn't catch them and we're in the Santee. We're gonna stop thinking about what we did wrong in the last two and think about what we can do right in this one. And tomorrow we might be fishing stupidly because I'm think I'm gonna gamble and try to catch us some daggone biggins. What does gambling mean? I've got an area where I feel like it's a safer place. It's definitely not a guarantee. It's not a guarantee at all that I can go there and catch enough to get a chick for two days in a row. And it's an area that I don't really think is going to hold up for multiple days. So I'm gonna run to an area where I did not get very many bites at all. Seen some big ones. I seen some bed fish and I caught one big one. And we're gonna run to that area and we're just gonna see what happens. I'm hoping that we catch them. If we don't we just don't. But I'm really hoping that we can generate some bites down there and catch the limit. Are you gonna bail out like 11? That's the plan right now. I'm gonna go to my starting area see what happens and if I if I fish around in there for an hour hour and a half and I have not got a bite we're gonna have to bail and go go run to some bed fish. Fish for some bed fish for I mean if they start biting if I can pick them off and catch them and get some stuff going I'll do that the whole rest of the day. If I go to three or four bed fish and I can't get them to bite it's 11 o'clock and I've got one or it's 11 o'clock and I've got none or something we're bailing. We're gonna make like an hour-long run somewhere else and uh try to grind it out. How do you decide when you're gonna bail on a bed fish? Like how long do you sit down? It just depends on his attitude. If I throw up there and he gets way off the bed like first cast he leaves the bed big time and doesn't come back you know for like 10 minutes we're done we're leaving that one already. If I throw up there and he doesn't get spooked and he's super aggressive at the bait I'll probably sit on that one even if it takes me 25 30 45 minutes I'll probably sit on that one for a long time because I know he's going to bite at some point in time and then you just kind of got to figure it out from there. I'll spend 10 or 15 minutes on a bed fish just kind of because I know it seems like that's the magic window after you've been on one for 10 or 15 minutes they seem to settle down get kind of used to the boat all that type of stuff and then they kind of get a little more acclimated to what you're doing and you can seem to catch them so I'll spend 10 or 15 minutes on one that seems kind of interested and then I'll bail and I'll spend a long time on one that I'm pretty sure I can get to bite because I mean sometimes you have fish where you know they'll bite they bite they bite the second cast and you miss him or whatever then you mess with him again he bites again like 10 minutes later you miss him again you mess with him for like 10 more minutes you miss him again or you hook him and lose him and then it takes you 20 more minutes to get him bite again then you catch him so you spend an hour on that fish but you got him to bite your second cast so you could have caught him in one minute but instead it took you an hour because things just didn't come together like it could have because I mean I could have hooked him the first time I set the hook and caught him that's just kind of the way that stuff goes sometimes when you're bed fishing so these are big males you know they're three to three and three quarter pound males so those are usually the ones where if they bite if if they bite they get it pretty good so we're hoping they bite we're hoping we don't even need to go to them we'll save them for day two if we got to but we'll just see how it goes fishing around any more questions um do you have a magic bait that you throw to bait got one when's this going out after term before well I was gonna do it before but we can do it after now since we've already given before it's fine because no no nobody can no nobody can uh get these I don't think so 13 fishing has a invader and they got it in white and they eat it really good on bed like surprisingly good on bed one of the I mean they eat they eat all baits on bed like they eat it really really good on bed you know like any bait that you throw has always I've always thought it's about the same doesn't really matter what you throw so I've always wanted to throw something with a thinner body where I know what they eat it I catch them since I've I've heard a lot of people talk about how like whenever they first get to a bed fish they like top water them a little bit or like mid water them do you always just like yeah always you're always going to do something that goes to the bottom yep you're never going to like try to aggravate them from the top or anything I will if he won't bite but for me I want to throw whatever bait in the bed that I'm going to land him the most percentage of the time on that's what I think about whenever I'm bed fishing is which bait if he bites will I land him on and usually I want to have a four aught Gamakatsu straight shank hook and some kind of small little piece of plastic and when I set the hook on him he's coming in the boat probably like 97 percent of the time you did catch an eight pounder on a spinning pole on Florida I did caught an eight pounder on a spinning pole on Florida that's all it would bite that's the only thing I could get it to bite and you know I'm not spinning pole will catch them it'll catch big ones but that fish I couldn't get him to bite couldn't get him to pull up in the bed nothing and I just was throwing that wacky rig to his face like I was letting it drop in front of his face and finally it ate it so I'm not above it I'll catch one I'll catch one on an old spinning pole on an egg beater day one starts tomorrow day one in the morning gotta rig some stuff