Dress rehearsal

Much of what it takes to win a tournament happens during practice

Many tournaments are won before the opening cast ever hits the water. Usually, the winning angler discovered some unique pattern or spot that enabled him to bring a trophy-class bag to the weigh scale.

This discovery isn’t something these anglers leave to chance. When they visit the tournament waters for the first time, they go through a precise system to help them use their allotted practice time effectively. That is what helps the winners take home the Wal-Mart FLW Tour gold.

Practice periods can be broken down into four phases. These phases are all equally important and the professional anglers spend countless hours on and off the water working on each phase of tournament practice.

Phase 1: Scouting

The first phase is simply called pre-visit scouting. Anglers search the library, Internet and government fisheries agencies for information on the tournament lake or river. They dissect the lake to determine the size and type of waterway. They look at charts, concentrate on the depth contours and study the surrounding terrain and possible bass cover. For example, lakes in populated areas may have bass living around boat docks and boat houses. Rivers could point anglers to large setbacks and deltas. Flooded valleys often mean sunken trees and roadbeds.

Anglers need to know something about the tournament water’s ecological features, such as water clarity and average fish size. Armed with this information, the tournament angler can make an educated game plan before arriving at the tournament site.

While many anglers don’t consider studying the waterway part of their practice, it can certainly point you in the right direction. It helps you eliminate unproductive techniques right from the start. Much of this work can be done shortly after the tournament schedule comes out.

Phase 2: Navigation

The second phase occurs two to three weeks before the tournament. This phase is simply the navigation component of practice. Basically, you drive your boat around the waterway to get an idea of channel markers, driving times, landmark locations and other important travel details. The navigation phase varies with each waterway. Lakes and reservoirs usually don’t require more than a few hours running time, but larger waters, like the Mississippi River delta, can take days of study before one can safely navigate around the tournament site.

Driving up and down the lake should not be considered a waste of time. Savvy anglers use the drive to study the lake’s landscape. Notice if the shore has deep ledges or shallow mud flats. Watch for visible fish cover, like trees, wing dams, weed beds and boat docks. Mark these places on your charts for future reference.

After running around the lake all day, study your chart. Based on your research and your on-the-water observations, you should be able to formulate a sound plan to test the fishery. In your plan, decide where you are going to fish and what techniques you will use.

Phase 3: The search

The third phase of your tournament practice can be called searching. You will likely spend the entire day casting and looking for two things – bass locations and activity levels. If you know both, you are in a very good position to take home a tournament check. Knowing only one of the two could still bring you luck if the tournament conditions become tough.

Start off your fishing day in an area that has a wide variety of structure and cover. Perhaps you can fish in a lake arm where a deep ledge adjoins a flooded timber plain. Or pick a backwater area loaded with different plant species, fallen trees, flooded bushes or old duck blinds. Finding such an area will help you answer several fishing questions.

Run through the area fishing every portion of the area. Don’t use the same lure with each cover type. Switch lures that are appropriate for the cover. Run crankbaits along the rocky banks and flip jigs into the trees. When you catch a bass, make a mental note how the bass was relating to the cover and how it hit your lure, and then keep moving. You will go back to the spot later.

This fishing methodology helps you answer both of the above questions. Even more specifically, you can find out what type of cover the bass prefer and what lure will catch them. After your first run through the area, go back to your best fishing cover. Work it over carefully and thoroughly with a variety of different lures.

For example, say your best spot had a group of large fallen trees. Your initial catch came on a jig. Do you remember how the bass took your jig? Did the bass hit it aggressively or softly? Aggressive bass may also attack faster moving baits, like spinnerbaits and soft plastic jerkbaits. Topwater plugs could also produce under the right conditions. Light biting bass are probably less aggressive. In that case, flip a worm or magnum-size flipping tube into the tree. These more subtle baits may trigger a few extra strikes. You are now fine-tuning your fishing pattern.

Repeat the process on your next two or three best fishing spots. If all goes according to the plan, by the end of the second day on the water, you could have a good idea of how and where to catch fish. It is now time to plan the rest of your pre-tournament practice.

Now that you have a decent idea as to what type of cover the bass prefer and how to catch them when you locate that cover, begin searching the fishery for areas with similar cover. Fish each of these areas with the same lures that worked the day before, but don’t be afraid to switch lures during the day. You might just find something that works better. After all, that should not be your major goal now. Basically, you want to find different areas of the lake that hold bass, preferably larger bass.

Continue this searching activity for the next couple of days. You should be able to cover large tracts of water during the day because you are looking for some specific areas and not randomly scouting around.

Toward the end of the your pre-tournament practice, repeat the above process on your second and third best patterns. You always need backup plans when things go wrong during the tournament. Sometimes these backup plans outperform your primary plan. Hopefully by the end of your pre-tournament practice trip, you have a good idea as to what you will do during the event.

Some anglers like to use guides and local experts to reduce their searching time. That idea is great if you can keep the guide’s information exclusively to yourself. That is often difficult. Many local anglers will show you “community holes.” Such spots are usually overfished and often lack quality bass. But these community holes can help you search for new fishing areas. Community holes often have distinct features that will be duplicated in other areas of the lake. After your guide trip, explore those other areas.

Phase 4: Last chance

The last phase of tournament practice occurs during the practice period just before the event. For weekend anglers, that practice will most likely be limited to the day or two immediately before the tournament. You need to fish these one or two days differently from your previous extended practice period. Mainly, you want to avoid fishing an area too hard. All you really want to do is run through your milk run of spots to see if the bass are still safely where you left them.

While you don’t want to catch too many fish the day before the tournament, you do need to bring a bass or two to the boat. Initially, you want to catch fish to ensure the bites are bass and not other fish species. You also want to see how big the bass are in each area. Make note of the bass sizes because when you begin the tournament, you want to start in the areas that produced the biggest bass.

Be sure to check out your secondary patterns, too. Tournaments are notorious for weather and water level changes. If you did your homework correctly, the backup plans should give you a strong edge during the tournament.

Tournament practice

Finally, consider each tournament day a practice day. During the event, when things don’t go well, feel free to practice fishing in new areas or just start the practice process over. Pick a new area with a variety of cover and structures. Then begin fishing the spot thoroughly until something happens. That technique has saved many tournament scores over the years.

We often hear stories about winning anglers who discovered new fishing spots during the tournament. They didn’t find these areas by luck. Each had a process that helped them pare down the fishery to find that secret bass spot. The skill and discipline to maintain an organized practice technique separates top anglers from the rest of the tournament field.