Fall is team tournament time across the country, when most team championships happen. The same is true for Bass Pro Tour anglers with the Fishing Clash Team Series. Getting to fish two of these events this fall has been a great experience, and it really brought me back to my roots and how I started tournament fishing.
It helps that I was able to fish with my good buddy Ott DeFoe again this fall after we won the Heritage Cup last year. We’re great friends and work well on the boat, which is one of the biggest keys to picking the right team partner. Here are a couple more tips that might help you in your team championship this season.
It doesn’t matter who catches them
Obviously, when fishing as a team, you have to work together to have success. But there’s a lot more to it than that. Growing up, I was fortunate to have another excellent team partner, Bryan Thrift, and we teamed up to fish events around the house. We had some great times over the years and worked well together because we were selfless.
To be a great team, you need individuals in the boat who don’t care who catches them. You also need to complement each other. For example, back then, if we were fishing shallow, I’d run the boat, and if we were offshore, Bryan ran the show. That’s how it worked best for us. Some days, he caught them all. Some days, it might have been me catching what we weighed in.
At the weigh-in, nobody would even know who caught them that day, because we didn’t talk about it or care. We were a team. Those teams that can put ego aside consistently rise to the top in a team format, and that’s what we’ve seen for all the Team Series events so far this year.
Lessons learned this fall
Another thing that stood out to me this year is how often we fish in the same areas as other teams. That’s not surprising, as we all tend to find the better places. But it was interesting to see how you can go down a bank right behind some of the best anglers out here and still catch fish. They’d catch a few, and then we could catch more going behind them. If another team were to come behind us, they could probably catch a few more.
No matter how good you think you are, you’re never going to catch them all down a stretch, and that’s something to keep in mind. You can’t worry if other boats are in the area, because good areas usually have quite a few fish swimming around.
This happens in our regular-season events, too. Sometimes, I’d watch the livestream after I was eliminated and see anglers fishing the exact areas I had been fishing in the tournament. Chad and J.T. have also talked about that and mentioned how certain docks or points would produce fish for several different anglers without any of them knowing they weren’t the only ones fishing there.
That goes back to the saying that 90% of fish are in 10% of the water. There will always be key stretches that have more baitfish, better cover or whatever it is bass are looking for. Those “community holes” that always produce are community holes because they hold bass year after year, and there’s no reason to overlook them. Whether you are in a team tournament or just out enjoying the cooler weather, they can produce some fish for you this fall.