Lefebre’s rededication paying off with strong start to season
Entering the 2024 Bass Pro Tour season, Dave Lefebre found himself at a crossroads. The longtime touring pro knew he hadn’t been performing up to his standards during the first five years of BPT competition, and that came to a head in 2023. He finished 74th in the Angler of the Year standings, his second-lowest finish across 21 years on the Bass Pro Tour, FLW Tour and Bassmaster Elite Series and worst since 2008.
Then, Major League Fishing announced that the BPT would trim its roster from 80 anglers in 2024 to 65 in 2025 and then 50 in 2026. With the top 45 anglers in career AOY finish at the end of the 2024 season guaranteed spots in the 2025 field, Lefebre found himself entering the year on the wrong side of that cut line.
Knowing he needed to boost his performance if he wanted to keep his spot on tour, Lefebre took stock of his situation. He realized he’d let other, off-water ventures get in the way of his preparation, and it was impacting his performance.
“I’ve been doing this a long, long time, and I was kind of getting a little lackadaisical the past few years,” he admitted.
That realization turned out to be a “reawakening” for Lefebre, and the Mercury pro has started the 2024 campaign strong. After making a pair of Knockout Rounds, including a Top-10 finish at Santee Cooper during Stage Two, Lefebre currently sits 14th in the Fishing Clash Angler of the Year race with more than half the season in the books — on pace for his best finish since his final year on the FLW Tour in 2015 and well positioned to re-qualify for the BPT in 2025. In addition to the top 45 anglers in career AOY finish, the 15 best of the rest will earn spots in the field based on their 2024 finish. Entering U.S. Air Force Stage Five Presented by WIX Filters on the Chowan River, Lefebre sits fifth among that group.
How has he done it? The veteran pro has simply gotten back to practicing and preparing like a veteran pro, spending virtually every day he isn’t traveling or competing on the water.
“I’m a pro fisherman,” Lefebre said. “I should be doing that every day, all day. That’s my attitude this year. The last five years, it just hasn’t been that way for me. I’d start getting geared up a week before the tournament — and I would include research in on that, too. Just kind of going through the motions, I found myself, after 20 years of doing that. I feel a little bit refreshed this year.”
More purposeful practice
On paper, the day that jump-started Lefebre’s strong season seems obvious: his second day of qualifying at Santee Cooper.
Lefebre had caught just one scorable bass for 4-12 on Day 1 and sat in 35th place in Group A. During his second day of competition, he found a stretch of cypress trees in deeper water and boated 13 bass totaling 46-0. The best day of anyone in the group, it vaulted him into the Knockout Round. He would go on to make his second ever Championship Round in Bass Pro Tour competition and first since 2021, finishing seventh.
Lefebre acknowledged making the Top 10 “fired me up,” and that his Day 2 turnaround gained him a lot of ground in the AOY standings. But he doesn’t necessarily believe his positive momentum started there.
Instead, he feels its source was one of the many days he’s spent fishing outside of competition, even though he can’t pinpoint which one. Spending more time fishing has allowed him to get into a decision-making groove that has translated to tournament competition.
“I think momentum doesn’t just happen when you’re in a tournament,” Lefebre said. “It could have happened last week. So yeah, I think (momentum) means something, but I think it’s just mostly about staying on the water. Things are changing so much in our sport fishing-wise, and just trying to stay on top of everything has always been key.”
As much as Lefebre believes spending more time on the water has paid off, his increased practice time hasn’t just been about reeling in bass. He’s used it to familiarize himself with new trends, technology and techniques.
Most important has been improving his forward-facing sonar acumen. Lefebre credited the technology for helping him find most of the fish he caught during his 47th-place finish at Stage One on Toledo Bend and for revealing “a mega-key fish or two” during each of the other events, which he wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
“In most of the tournaments, it’s been where you’re just doing something else and you’re so used to looking at that thing — like in between targets, whether you’re fishing a dock or a tree, you’re still panning around and seeing that straggler fish,” he said.
Just as important as becoming proficient with the new technology has been developing a sense for when to turn it off. At Stage Three on Dale Hollow, Lefebre planned to use his Lowrance ActiveTarget to chase schooling smallmouth and largemouth, like much of the rest of the field. But, when he couldn’t get those fish to bite on the first morning of competition, he switched gears and salvaged a 27th-place finish around the bank – perhaps not a splashy result, but important in the points race.
At Santee Cooper, he used ActiveTarget to locate areas with populations of bass, then went old-school to catch them, turning off all his electronics and flipping a soft-plastic lizard around cypress trees.
“We’ve got all these fancy graphs on our boats — I think I have like six graphs and 85 transducers,” Lefebre said following his Day 2 rally. “I got to my area and I shut everything off. Literally, not on standby, just shut them off, just decided to focus on fishing. And it was kind of a cool deal — peaceful, different, and I think it made a difference.”
Not satisfied yet
While Lefebre is pleased with his start to the season and excited by the upcoming schedule – the Erie, Pennsylvania, native has a Top-10 finish on the James River on his résumé and is always at home fishing for smallmouth up north – he’s not about to start getting comfortable now.
Even though he made the Knockout Round at Stage Four on Oklahoma’s Lake Eufaula, he left with a bad taste in his mouth, falling to 20th place in the Knockout Round after qualifying third in Group A. Plus, one of the things he feels he’s taken for granted in recent years is his ability to contend on northern smallmouth waters — he has just one top-40 finish in six such events over the past three seasons. He doesn’t want to find himself stressed over points in what figures to be a season-ending slugfest on the St. Lawrence River.
For now, Lefebre’s focus is squarely on keeping his successful streak rolling at the Chowan River, a unique challenge that he believes will loom large in his quest to keep his spot on the Bass Pro Tour roster.
“This is a big one, here,” Lefebre said. “We’ve got a little bit of a cushion there for the cut line; and this one here, growing that cushion is a big deal so I don’t have to worry so much going into those last couple.”