So I just got done with back to back tournament weekends at Dale Hollow and Norris Lake. while I feel my performance was less than what I wanted, at the same time I still don’t think I would shift my strategy. How strange is that. I take 89th, 31st, 37th, and 17th, and still no one can talk me off of this ledge. Take Sunday at Dale, I took 31st with 2 fish. Sure it was a tough day. Yes, Dale is brutal in high pressure blue sky summer conditions. That clear water isn’t doing an angler any favors during summer months. But the playing conditions are equal for all so there is no complaining from me. My only complaint is that I am too fair skinned for that level of sun, so I have to wrap up like a mummy and then you get hot, but as I have begun to really acclimate, I can’t say I was that uncomfortable. But my two fish weighed 4 lbs 9 ounces, and 4 lbs 5 ounces, respectively. This is what really bothers, me, I got the kicker fish and failed to get the passengers. The problem usually lies in getting the 4 pounders, but I had that one solved.
It was solved as a result of a sudden change in how I view tournament fishing.
The Juxtaposition of Dale Hollow
While many anglers occupied the main lake flats, and other locales friendly to dragging Carolina rigs through shoals and grass beds, I ran by this area of the lake to the far west side. This immediately put me into an interesting gambit that was similar to the situation I faced at South Holston a few weeks ago. I was playing a 1st or last strategy.
The west side of Dale Hollow holds huge fish, but I question the numbers in the summer pattern. In any case, they are tricky to find, and tricky to catch. In practice, I fished everywhere and I came to the conclusion that the eastern creeks were mediocre, and the main lake flats, aside from being pressured, felt a lot like 12 pounds best case. But the west side held fish like this monster.
This created a real dilemma in my mind. Because I too caught fish on the main lake flats. I dragged that Carolina rig around and picked up the occasional 2 pounder. 5 of those and I would weigh 10-11 pounds for a respectable 14th place finish.
But that is what kept on getting to me.
I think when you get past your first win, a few things happen to you as a fisherman. Or maybe it is just me. But this is what I experienced. First, I now knew that I could win without any reservation. I also realized that I was capable of planning a winning strategy and executing said strategy when required. This is good stuff. Plus winning is really awesome, and I want to do it a lot more. But in practice a second thought kept looming in my mind.
Can you go for a win without risking a serious loss? I think maybe sometimes you can, but more often than not a run for victory requires you to forfeit the comfort of a safe showing. Getting back to Dale, I committed to the Western lake and the Tokyo rig with a number of things in mind.
- I was going for the win, no question.
- The Tokyo rig catches huge fish, the sort I was looking for.
- The quantity was not going to be there, a full bag would be tough.
- Time, and traffic conditions were going to be against me.
#3 was the thing that I was most unhappy about. But to get an understanding of where I was coming from, let’s discuss Columbus burning his ships.
Setting up for a tournament is always difficult because you have to make some choices on what you are going to do, and it is easy to get flighty and do a little of everything resulting in nothing. This is especially the case when your main strategy is a low quantity approach. Knowing this, I did not rig up for a lot of diversity before the tournament. I was going Tokyo rig and did not have much else in the arsenal, thus I was motivated to see that it worked. Here is what I had on the deck.
My first two rods were set up precisely the same. They consisted of 7’4″ Lew’s Custom Pro SpeedStick rods in Heavy power. Granted, this is a rod more designed for pitching heavy baits, but I think it is perfect for my setup. I practiced a bit with the 7’6″ version of this rod, but felt it was ungainly for my intended strategy. The 7’4″ was the right choice. Added to this, I chose Lew’s Superduty 300 reels with 16 pound flourocarbon.
I am a believer in confidence making you a better fisherman, and I had confidence in the 7’4″ custom pro coupled with the superduty 300. This was the starting team no question. On both of these rods, I rigged a VMC 3/0 Tokyo rig, one with a 3/4 ounce Strike King tour grade tungsten bullet weight, and the other with a 3/8 ounce. On both, I put a 5″ Strike King Zero Stick worm in Watermelon.
After that I had 3 backup rods which I knew I wasn’t going to fish. The first was a 6’10” Lew’s Pro TI rod in medium heavy. Attached to this was a Pro TI reel with a Strike King KVD finesse Spinnerbait in white. (I always have this rod/reel/lure combo all year round no matter what.) The second was a 7’2″ Lew’s Pro TI rod in medium, rigged on 10lbs line, with a Strike king 1/4 bullet weight Carolina rig. (The whole time I rigged this rod I was thinking it was just going to sit there on the deck for show, and it did.) I used a 2ft 8 lbs mono leader, with the same 5″ zero worm as the Tokyo rigs. Finally, my last rod, like the spinnerbait above, is a mandatory, I have it with me at all times and consists of another 6’10” Lew’s Pro TI rod in medium heavy with 12lbs floro, with a 3/8 ounce hack attach heavy cover swim jig in super white and a Strike King rage swimmer trailer in 3.25″ pearl. I catch a lot of fish on deep lay downs during summer with this presentation. The only difference between spring and summer is I move from a chartreuse color and up the degree to which it is weedless. (This is essentially the difference between shore cover in spring, where I use the Strike King tour grade swim jig and deep structure cover cover in summer where I prefer the hack attack.)
That was it. And I had no plans on fishing the backup rods. I was going fishing with the Tokyo rigs one way or another.
Columbus’ ships were set alight. No going back.
And here is where we get to my critical mistake, and another reminder of why I stayed regional for the spring and early summer. To explain we need to go back to Thursday and my feeling of elation on the drive home from Dale after having a good practice. I caught 2 fish, both significant along a creek flat maybe 500 yards from the main lake on the west side. Not wanting to pressure the flat, I stopped cold and left immediately. I proceeded to not fish at all on Friday in order to keep the site cool. There were few if any individuals fishing this area through the week, so I was confident and happy all day Friday. However, it rained…hard. On Thursday night and Friday began tumultuous and ended up being sunny.
And those fish along that ledge at some point moved to the main lake.
Of course I did not find that out until Saturday morning at 11 am. I fished those creek mouths hard for hours with no results before I checked the main lake and caught a few mediocre fish before heading in to a miserable finish. This is where fishing in a low quantity scenario can really compromise you. If the fish move, low quantity can become no quantity. Which is exactly what happened to me. I failed to pivot fast enough and paid the price. Sunday, however, was a very difference scenario. Here, I began again in the creek mouths looking for those big fish, and pivoted earlier to the main lake, to catch 2 really good bass, enough to lock 31st with 2 in a 5 fish field. So better, but in retrospect, I again wasted the early morning bite, and the early morning calm on what worked in practice, rather than what was working in the tournament.
Both days I made mental errors. I held so strongly to a location that I had confidence in and failed to pivot efficiently. When people talk about the benefit of tournament experience, this is exactly what they are referring to. Dale demonstrated I had a good strategic plan, and a lack of tournament experience.
Believe me. I have spent weeks thinking about it. But don’t take this as a negative sentiment, I have seen it instead as positively as can be. I found and caught the fish I wanted on Sunday. But my failure to fully pivot prevented my ability to capitalize. All in all, I feel great about these tournaments even though I did not perform as well as one would hope.
A Tale of Two Norris Lakes
So fast forward a week and I am glamping happily next to Norris Lake in Tennessee, trying to decide what I am going to do for the weekend and I have another, very unsettling problem.
Norris is crystal clear.
So crazy clear it was weird. The water had taken on that strange turquois color. There was no bite to speak of, and to cap it off, you could only keep a single smallmouth which had to be over 20″. If this requirement would not have been in place it would have been an interesting main lake smallmouth shootout, as they were active early. But practice showed that catching a lot of 16-19″ smallmouths was the direct result of going for your 20+.
So here we go, after fishing for 3 days from one side of Norris to the other, I came to the conclusion on the eve of the tournament that I was not staying on Norris at all. Instead, I was heading up the Clinch river until I found stained water. And where there is stained water, there are largemouth.
All I took were my swim jig and my spinnerbait goto’s, plus a Texas rig for deep cover fishing.
So two days in a row, I ran 40+ miles up the Clinch river until the water took on a reasonable stain and fished for largemouth and spots. This landed me 37th and 17th. I will say that the fog delays definitely hurt the plan. It was a long run out, and longer back because of the boat traffic, so losing a couple hours in the morning hurt, but everyone lost that time so its inconsequential.
The thing that really hurt me was going up that river having never been up there. I was late with the development of this strategy, fishing at a tough time in unfamiliar water.
But this is once again a lack of experience, but not tournament experience, rather experience fishing in reservoir lakes during the summer months. As I have said, I moved to Cumberland to get reservoir fishing experience, but each year I have been up north by June. The delay in these tournaments due to Covid placed them nearly in July instead of April. This was a situation that really challenged my strategic planning.
Again, like Dale, I knew I did not want the main lake flats approach, but I was without a clue as how to proceed.
I got the right plan in the end, but it took too long, even one day earlier would have given me time to look at the water far west and develop a plan on where it would be productive.
Coming away from it, however, I am thrilled. Just like Dale. The past weeks have not been filled with the placements that wanted, but they were not empty.
I have for the first time applied transformational thinking to my fishing. Somewhere in the past month, I changed and evolved into a different fisherman than I was before.
One thing that stands out more than anything else is that I am no longer fishing with reservation. I am not fishing afraid, but with purpose.
Another way of putting it is that I am fishing to win. Consider Dale, I fished for the biggest fish in the lake, to win. With Norris, I left altogether a body of water I considered compromised and searched for active waters, distant active waters, to win.
This is an ‘At All’ strategy shift.
I now believe that certain decisions have to be made in order to have a chance to win at all. The first is about the concept of targeting what fish give you the chance to win at all, and the second is about what place gives you the chance to win at all. And when you consider the Tokyo rig, a lure heavily leaning towards bigger fish, you see the presentation that gives you a chance to win at all.
There are many ‘At All’s’ in competitive fishing. And I am thinking in these terms during planning now. I was not before. Before it was about catching fish. Now it is about catching ‘specific‘ fish.
The strategy and execution weren’t there, but the foundation for my future thinking was there. That is what I am left with. My approach in terms of what I will fish for, where I will fish, and how I will fish is irrevocably changed.
Proverbially, I am left with this clear understanding of what it means to take two steps forward and one step back.
My two steps forward was winning and gaining the confidence that I can compete and win. The step back is that I have become an all or nothing competitor, and now must seek to understand how this translates to planning, pivoting, and competing on the water. It pervades my thinking and approach, I am considering these questions from the moment I wake up until I go to sleep at night. I did not even plan this, it just happened, like a switch being flipped.
There is one thing I know for sure.
I have found my authentic style of fishing. What a surprise…
