After my stellar performance on Lake Jordan I was voted in to the club. I guess they thought I wasn't to much of a liability because they could not have been impressed my skills. I got knocked out in the first round of my last fight and got right back in the ring. I signed up to be a non boater in the B.A.S.S. 2009 Mercury Qualifier on Neely Henry, April 18th. Never fished there before, but to be honest I had really never fished most lakes in Alabama.
The way these things work is there are way more people who want to be boaters than non boaters. So after they pair the non boaters, they pair boaters with other boaters. This causes problems because all the boater want to go where they want to go and they argue over who's boat to use, etc... The only way around this is if you pair with a non boater before the tournament on your application. It's called a guaranteed boater. You don't get to fish with that person during the tournament but you generally practice with them and split expenses, like hotels and fuel. A lot of guys will pair up for the year so they don't have to worry about finding a non boater for every federation tournament.
Enough about how it works, here's what happened. Lee Byrd, a member in my club contacted me about pairing up. I agreed and we practiced a couple days before the tournament. Lee had a Gator Jet boat, which is basically a souped up flat boat with a jet engine on it. A couple people told me to be careful because Lee would drive in water that was 6 inches deep, he loved shallow water and had the right boat for the job. I caught some fish in practice but didn't learn much. Lee was focused on his game and would give me little pointers here and there. I was trying to impress him with everything I thought I knew.
I got paired out with Victor Harper who was from Tuscaloosa and he was the nicest guy I ever met. He threw a Hilderbandt Spinnerbait most of the day and the bite was very slow. I had one small fish in the well that I caught swimming a jig and Victor had two. We had both caught more fish but they didn't measure. We were fishing a big shallow flat in the back of a creek, basically blind casting looking for dark spots which could be stumps. With an Hour left I caught one that went 4.68 lbs on a Master Blaster Spinnerbait . At the end of the day I had 6.30 lbs and qualified for the State Championship by .02 of an ounce.
There wasn't much I learned during the tournament or practice because I was to cocky to ask questions. I kept telling Lee what we should be doing because I thought Jordan was a fluke and I still knew all I needed to know. It wasn't until after the tournament that I found out that Lee was the most accomplished fisherman in our club. He had stints as a professional and had fished in the Bassmaster Classic (the Super Bowl of fishing) before. Lee would go on to win the State championship later in the year and I wished I would have taken more time to ask him what he thought instead of telling him how I thought we could wack'em.
Lessons learned and to-do's:
1) You can't learn anything if you don't shut up.
2) I liked the hidden weight spinnerbaits, Strike Zone lures made
3) I needed to gain confidence in a technique and quit trying to match what the boater was doing.
The bass that qualified me.
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