"The more I practice, the luckier I get. "
Last October I had two tournaments on Lake Martin, AL. The first was a club tournament and the Second was the Bassmasters Federation State Championship, a two day tournament. At this point I had to change my definition of “winning”, it wasn’t necessarily getting first place. I had to look at winning as getting better over time, learning from every fish, every trip, every partner. I looked at not catching fish as a positive, because it told me what not to do for a given set of circumstances. When I broke something I learned how to fix it. Everything was taken in stride and as long as I was learning by doing, I was moving forward. I was feeling pretty good after winning the big fish night tournament on Lay Lake and coming in second by a quarter of a pound on Lake Guntersville. I had accomplished two goals so far- 1) catch a limit in a tournament and 2) cash a check. I had to keep it going and I wanted to win a tournament as a boater which I knew would happen in time and I also wanted to finish in the top six in my club. I had no idea what to expect from the State Championship but wanted to have a good showing. The club tournament two weeks before would give me an idea of what to expect from Lake Martin.
I was paired out with Mathew Hebert (nickname Shrek) who was a giant guy from Wisconsin. He hadn’t done to well in the tournaments so far and I wasn’t sure how the trip would go. After talking to him I was reassured at the very least we would have fun since he was such a nice guy. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to finish strong but fishing with someone who was not a jerk was also pretty high on my list. To this day, I have never fished with anyone in any of these tournaments that I couldn’t get along with, but I have heard some horror stories. This was also the first tournament that my partner asked if I had any spots I wanted to fish. You are supposed to split the day and the front of the boat with your partner. If you didn’t have any spots to go to or were unfamiliar with the lake you would generally give up this split and just sit your butt in the back of the boat. Not sure why he wanted my input but I was happy to give him my 2 cents and tell him where I thought the fish should be.
The weather had been cooling down and I thought the fish should have started making their migration back into the creeks from the main lake. I wanted to fish secondary and main lake points and try to find some fish along the breaks of these points. He thought that was an okay idea, then I saw some fish busting just outside of where we were launching on a secondary point. After everyone blasted off, we idled over to the point and I started throwing a green pumpkin trick worm on a 3/16th oz weight. I quickly boated two keepers and Matthew kept chunking his crankbait to no avail. We jumped a couple of points and I had two more and Mathew had started throw a worm too. He had one small keeper and I had four that were barely over 12 inches.
We shot up river since we weren’t catching the fish we needed. When we got to our new spot a couple of miles up river the outboard made a loud noise and we quickly found out all we had was a trolling motor. Mathew said he always had engine trouble, which was nice to know since we were in the middle of a tournament. We fished some rip rap near a point on the main river and I caught a decent 2 pound spotted bass on a watermelon Berkley Dover Crawler. I had five but couldn’t cull up. We limped the boat all the way back to the ramp with the trolling motor and that took us the rest of the day. With the blue bird skies and post front conditions the bite was really tough. It only took 7.73 pounds to win, and my 6.16 was good enough for third. Three tournaments in a row, three checks cashed.
Takeaways:
· Always carry your cell phone and make sure it’s charged!!!
· Even on tough days fish will eat a finesse worm.
Nice Largemouth practicing for State Championship -Lake Martin
Good spot practicing for State Championship- Lake Martin
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