Don’t Waste Time Finding Bass

How do you prepare differently for a small little local lake tournament than you do for an elite series? Because you have been on the grind since we got home. You know, for me, I just like to fish, you know. I fish as many tournaments as I can. Luckily, I'm in an area where, you know, the people welcome it. Like, they want me to, you know, come fish the tournaments, you know. It's not like they don't want me there and they would rather me not show up. They seem to really like me fishing around them, you know. So, I mean, that's really cool. I'm really thankful for that, you know. I've heard other people say as soon as they, you know, became pros that they're not allowed on any of their small little local lake tournaments anymore. And I'm lucky, you know. I grew up fishing around here since I was 12, 13, 14, 15 years old. I've been fishing some of these same tournaments my entire life. So, I kind of grew up with some of these guys, you know. So, I feel like, for me, I just like to fish as many tournaments as I can. And the way that I prepare for tournaments on lakes around the house, I fish a lot, you know. So, I'm out here on these lakes that we, there might be a tournament on it tomorrow evening or something. Well, I don't really practice for those tournaments, you know. Like, if I'm out here and I get a bite, I usually catch them, you know. Like, it's not like I shake them off, you know. Like, if I do see one on bed the day before a tournament, I usually catch it, you know. So, it's like, I don't really do that. I could come out here and try to practice for the tournaments, but I just don't, you know. If I'm practicing for an elite event, I don't set the hook that often. I only set the hook whenever I'm in an area that I don't think I'm going to come to unless I know there's good quality there. So, then I'll catch a couple out of an area. If I know that it's a spot that's, just say I got a spot that's close to takeoff or it's in an area that I already know I'm going to fish, then I get a bite, I almost always shake that bite off. But, if I'm, you know, just out here fun fishing, I catch them all. I catch as many as I can, and then I come back and might fish a tournament tomorrow night, and then I can't even go back to that area because I know that I caught all of them that were probably upstaging or whatever. So, I run different water. So, I don't prepare at all for the smaller local lake tournaments, really. I pretty much probably shoot myself in the foot more often than not, but that's how it goes. I just like to fish. I like to catch them. I like getting a bite. I like setting the hook. I like fighting the fish. I like everything about it. So, when I get a bite, I set the hook on them. You know, that's just how I do it. You said in your last video you weren't gonna catch anymore, and then you picked up a frog and literally set the hook the next cast. Yeah. I was like, I just set all the ends of it. Yeah, that was a problem. You know, sometimes it's hard to shake them off, but I do try to shake off the bigger ones. Now, even in practice, if I see one, like on Seminole, I had this one stretch where I was throwing a swim jig. I saw a three-pounder eat it. Didn't set the hook. Then, I saw a 13-incher eat it. Well, I caught him, and then I saw another big one eat it, so I shook him off. So, you know, I saw how big they were, so I caught them, and then there was one, though, that frog bite. You talking about the one on Seminole? The big one? I saw that fish waking, and I definitely should not have caught it, but it was like three days before the tournament, and it was just out here waking. I don't know if it was eating shad or it was spawning or what, and I threw that frog in it like four times, and the fish came up on it, and I saw him come up on it, so I threw him there again. He came up on it again, but he didn't bite it. Then, like the fourth cast, he bit it, and I caught it, and I wish I wouldn't have because maybe I would have caught him, but another boat ended up starting in that area. Maybe he would have caught it. I don't know, but either way, I need to shake them off a little bit more diligently. Honestly, what percentage of fish do you think you shake off are actually going to be there once you go back? I caught, I think, two on day one of Seminole that I shook off in practice. Two on day one of Seminole that I shook off in practice that I caught in the tournament on day one. You think they stay right there? They don't move? One of them moved about three feet, and the other one was in the exact same cast, but that's crazy to me because do you remember that video we watched the other day where that guy was tracking the bass? Yeah. Those fish were moving. Some of them do, but it depends on the time of the year. Those fish are staging, trying to spawn, like they've picked somewhere that they're going to sit until it's time for them to go on bed, you know, and then another wave will pull up, and then some more fish will pull up to those same areas and stage until they're trying to go on bed. So, yeah, if we track those fish in May, they probably do. They probably swim all over the place a lot more. Not all of them do. One fish stayed on the same dock for a long time, and they caught it twice on the same dock on that tracking survey, so I don't think all the fish that I shake off are going to bite. In fact, way probably over 70 or 80 percent of the ones I've shaken off in practice, I do not catch in the tournament, but if you shake off every bite and catch 10 percent of them, it's worth it, you know, because you might catch a different one, or you might catch one 20 or 30 feet away from it that you didn't, you know, like I shook them off over here, but I caught one over here, and you don't know if it's the same fish or not. It may be. It may not be, but I just feel like the more fish you leave in the area that you're going to fish in the tournament, the better. It also helps like if all the other elites are shaking them off too. Yeah, and we have we have tournaments where we have certain tournaments where I feel like they don't shake any off, and we have some tournaments where I feel like they shake a bunch off, and it's definitely around the spawn. If they're spawning a lot, I feel like people shake them off more. If they're not spawning, I feel like people don't, but I can think back to them. That should be the opposite though, because pretty much if they're on bed, they'll probably be there. Like, I mean, in Texas, you caught the same fish three days in a row. It just depends. If the female has laid eggs in the bed, and the males garden those eggs, you could catch that fish multiple times, you know, every day until those eggs hatch, three or four times a day sometimes. If there's no eggs in the bed, and you catch them, sometimes they'll leave. Sometimes they won't. Bless you. Thank you. What about, like, up north, the smallmouth? If you, if you're looking for a big school, and you need to know how big they are, do you need to catch more of those? If I, like, last year on St. Lawrence, I found, I don't know, five or six schools that had at least 50 fish in them, and I sat on those schools, and caught them, and caught them, and caught them, and caught them, you know, and I never, I caught a three pounder out of one school, and I caught a three pounder out of another school, but that's with me catching just pound and a half, or pound and a quarter, two pounder, pound and a half, or pound and a half, or pound and a halfer, then you catch three. And, you know, in that tournament, you only want to weigh in a three, you know, so I did stay on those. You got a mosquito on you, huh? Right here, on this side. I think you got him. Well, in those tournaments, you know, it just depends on the quality that you have to catch, so I try to shake them off a lot if I know they're big ones. If I don't, you know, I'm gonna sit there and see what kind of potential it has, but I had some huge schools of bass in that last terminal, St. Lawrence, but I didn't think I could catch 15 pounds out of them schools, you know, like, I thought I could catch 13 pounds out of them schools, and that's with me catching two three pounders. If I did catch two three pounders, or even three three pounders, you know, and then if I catch two two and a halves, I've still only got 14 pounds, you know, and that, those were, those would be five big ones for the schools that I found. So, you know, as far as the big giant schools, now the, I found some schools that had big ones in them, but they weren't those 50 or 60 fish schools, so, you know, it just kind of depends. You got to kind of play it by ear, and just see, see exactly kind of how you're feeling for the tournament, what kind of weight it's going to take, you know, like, you don't want to go shake off a bunch of two pound males, and then think that you, you know, I got 20 bites today, flipping, but if they're, if they're all pound and a half to two and a half pound males, and you're on a lake where it's gonna take 17 a day to get paid, you know, you don't want to just shake off 20 bites, then go back to them, and they're spawning, and you catch them all, and now you got 12 pounds, you know, so, and it's going to take 17 a day to get paid. So, you know, you kind of got to feel what kind of quota you've got, how you're feeling about it, you know, kind of what it's going to take if you're in a good area of the lake, you know, that, that's just kind of, it all kind of varies. So, advice for people that don't really feel like they know how to practice, and they're practicing on a lake that they know well, would you say that they should do things that they're not used to doing on that lake when they go and practice, because they pretty much can fall back on what they're used to doing? I don't think so. Um, usually, I do some risky stuff in practice, more than I probably should, and I don't like to do that until I feel like I have something I can fall back on. So, like, if I go first day of practice, first half of the day in practice, I feel like I got a decent pattern where I feel like fish are going to be coming to me, not leaving, then I'll try to go do some weird stuff for maybe half a day, the second day of practice, whatever, and try to, you know, try to find where a big school of fish are coming. But it seems like, to me, you're just better off if you fish your strengths, you run around and you do what you want to do on the lakes you go to. I mean, everywhere you go, you can do something that you're comfortable doing, you know, and even if it's, even if you don't think it's the winning deal, you're oftentimes going to have a better tournament doing things that you really understand, you know. What about if you have a tournament on this lake and you've watched videos from that lake and you see them doing something completely different than what you're used to doing? Do you think they should go and try that, at least? I don't like to pull up in practice, under official practice, and do something completely foreign to me. To me, I feel like you're going to waste time, you don't really understand, like, if you're doing a pattern that you don't really understand what makes the fish trigger, what makes the fish bite. Or why you're even doing it. Or exactly why you're doing it, exactly. A lot of times you waste time because you don't make adjustments quickly enough when you don't have the great understanding of what's going on. So, you know, like, just say you're an extremely good ledge fisherman and there's, like, you get, like, not that many bites on ledges, okay, in this specific tournament, but you're not that good of a shallow water flipper or whatever. Well, if you think the tournament's going to be one flipping shallow, a lot of times if you go up there and you hadn't had a bite in an hour, you don't understand that you should have already made two or three small adjustments, you know, because if it's not something that you're extremely comfortable doing and don't really understand, you're not going to make those adjustments quickly enough. Like, if you're out there ledge fishing and you've, you know, and you're super good at it and you've, you know, fished for 15 or 20 minutes without a bite, you're going to start thinking, okay, I need to do something to trigger these fish. Well, if you're up there kind of just going through the motion shallow and you don't really understand it, you don't understand how quickly you should be making adjustments. So, a lot of times you end up wasting a lot of time, you know, like I did that at first, ledge fishing. I'd get on the area and I'd see fish and I would throw baits through them and rotate baits through them and I couldn't really figure out how to, how to trigger those fish sometimes. Sometimes I could, sometimes I couldn't, and it's like, I just don't make the adjustments quite as quickly doing things that I don't really understand I'm not as comfortable doing as some other people will. So, if they're making adjustments better than you are, they're going to beat you more times than not. And whenever you're doing things that you understand, you can make those adjustments extremely quickly and stay around the fish, stay on top of the fish and everywhere they move. So, for me, I feel like when you understand what you're doing, you just have better tournaments. And usually the videos are edited, so you don't know what adjustments those people... Yeah, you don't know. All you see is the hook sets and the reeling and the culling. You know, you don't understand exactly what all they went through, how many bites they got today. Like, they might have went three or four hours without a bite and then busted them for like 15 minutes. And I've done that fishing shallow, whatever. You know, I might start off and get a flurry in the morning where I catch like three or four big ones, like, or three or four good ones, like quick. Then I don't get a bite for three hours. Then all of a sudden, bam, I catch three more big ones. And it's like, oh, he's dialed in, you know, he had 19 and a half pounds. And it's like, not really. You know, I caught seven bass all day. It's just, you know, they happen to be good ones, you know. So, it looks good. It looks like somebody's catching them. But for the most part, if you don't really understand what you're doing, you're not going to be able to consistently make the adjustments you need to. Well, what if you go to a lake and you know how it's going to be? St. Lawrence, you know, it's going to be pretty much one on a school of smallmouths. And you're fishing the open and you're trying really hard to make the elites. You've already done good on the southern swing. What are you going to do? Are you going to try that? You have to try it. You have to try it. If you Well, that's different because that's a lake where everybody's going to do well doing one thing, you know. So, it's like, you can salvage a tournament though. But like, if you need to go into a tournament like St. Lawrence River and you need to top 10 to qualify for the elites or whatever, and you are not a very good smallmouth fisherman, you still have to fish for smallmouth. Like, you're going to have to because you can go fish for largemouth, catch 17 or 18 pounds a day, and you're going to come in 35th or 40th, you know. Like, in our last tournament, it took over 20 a day to make the top 50. So, as far as that goes, in my opinion, you have to fish for smallmouth. But I was talking about more along the lines of, you're on the lake, like in the south, where there's multiple ways to get a bite. You should always fish your strengths because, you know, everybody's going to be catching largemouth or whatever. But if you go somewhere like that, you have to fish for smallmouth, in my opinion. Now, there's been tournaments where guys have top 10 in the St. Lawrence River fishing for largemouth, and it's definitely happened. But the odds would just be greatly against you. But that doesn't mean you have to go fish for smallmouth super deep. You can catch some shallow. You can catch some on topwater. You can catch some doing all kinds of different stuff. But you have to fish for the type of fish that's going to win, you know, definitely. That's it. Fish your strengths. That's it. Don't forget boat snacks. You better not.