Wow! What a tournament. In my wildest dreams I never thought I’d go wire-to-wire, not against the guys in the Bassmaster Elite Series. They’re just too darn good.
During practice I realized that the fishing was going to be better this year than it was the last time we were here. Back then I just wanted to catch a couple of keepers. This year I knew that wasn’t going to do anything. The bite was good enough that there would be lots of limits brought to the scales every afternoon. My goal was to be in that group.
I found some pretty good fish back in the canals up and off the main river. That gave me what I wanted for the first two days when the water was good and getting better. Then came Saturday and the rains.
Saturday morning wasn’t too bad, but by the middle of the day things were beginning to change in my canals. The water was rising, and it was starting to get muddy. I mean, when the water is rising at the same time the tide is going out you know things are going to get tough.
Before the rain hit I was getting several bites in a row when I cast my spinnerbait or flipped and pitched my Luck-E-Strike Live-Motion Drop Dead Craw. A lot of the fish were short, but at least they were fish. After the rain took hold of the water I was lucky to get any bite at all.
So, I made a decision: Go back towards the ramp — with less than a half-hour to fish — and see if I could get a couple of better fish from new water, spots that I hadn’t fished even in practice. It worked.
When the weigh-in was over, I realized I was going into the final day with a 2 pound lead. That’s not a lot of weight but given the conditions I thought that if I could catch three or four I’d be in pretty good shape, and I figured a limit would probably make me ecstatic on Sunday evening.
The water was ugly Sunday morning. I have enough experience the know that when you’re running upstream and you’re seeing huge balls of hyacinths coming towards you, things have gotten out of control. Nevertheless, I fished my canals until around midday. I had two fish in the boat at that time. I knew it wasn’t going to happen for me where I was so I turned my boat around and headed back to fish the spot I’d fished Saturday afternoon.
I caught what I needed from that spot and eventually won the tournament. If there’s a lesson here it’s in two parts. The first one is that in fishing you have to make adjustments based on the conditions. Making changes doesn’t guarantee success but sticking with the same plan when it isn’t producing guarantees a tough day.
The second part of the lesson is that we shouldn’t let Mother Nature get the better of us. There’s almost always a fish biting somewhere. Our job is to figure out where that is and why that is.
Focus. Find. Figure out. Enjoy.
Chris Lane’s column appears monthly on Bassmaster.com. You can also find him on Twitter and Facebook or visit his website, www.chrislanefishing.com.