JESSE WIGGINS: I Learned Some Valuable (and Painful) Lessons at Lake Fork
There’s really no other way to put this: Lake Fork was brutal to me. I didn’t finish dead last, but it was close. I’m not one to make excuses when I don’t do well, and can admit that I missed the bite completely.
During practice, I was getting some bites on points, and even though I wasn’t catching a bunch of them, they were big ones. I figured I could make it work, and that the better size fish I was catching would be enough to give me a chance.
On the first day, I only caught one bass out off the points with a crankbait before deciding to look shallow at the end of the day. I caught two nice ones in the last hour or so, and that’s when I realized that I messed up badly.
The Sight Bite
I’m not the world’s best sight-fisherman and that’s part of why I tried to make the offshore bite work. If I had it to do again, I would put the trolling motor on high and burn down the bank looking for spawning fish the whole time.
Another thing that got to me was how many boats would be in each little pocket. There would be 10 boats in a small area, and our guys would go right behind other boats and still catch fish. Part of that is because there were so many fish up shallow; the other part is how good our field is at sight fishing.
They made it look much easier than it was.
Around home on Smith Lake, if you have 10 boats in a pocket, those bass are going to get out of there. That wasn’t the case on Lake Fork and it’s still something I’m learning as I get more experience on different lakes and with Florida-strain largemouth.
Hindsight is always 20/20 and it’s easy to see where you messed up. In any tournament, good or bad, you should be able to learn a few things, and I came away with a few hard lessons from Lake Fork.
One is that you don’t always have to avoid the crowds to do well. I always try to avoid the crowds, but guys did well by fishing around other boats and fishing right beside each other. That’s something I’ll keep in mind next time we’re in a similar situation.
Getting Revenge at Smith Lake
When you have a terrible tournament like I did, you start to question your skills and wonder what you’re doing fishing at this level. Right after Lake Fork, I drove nine hours straight home, and it made me want to get some revenge and fish again.
So, when I got home, I went out to Smith just to prove to myself that I still know how to set the hook. My best five bass would have been around 20 pounds in four hours of fishing. All I could do was laugh.
I posted a video about this on my social media pages, poking fun at myself for doing better at a lake known for smaller fish like Smith Lake than I did at a big-bass factory like Lake Fork. That’s just how it goes sometimes.
One thing that I’ve realized in this game is that you can only go off of what you know and what you’ve experienced. I’m still learning, and Lake Fork definitely taught me a valuable lesson.