Mental toughness and early limits

Sometimes bass fishing is tough to love. For many pros, day one of the Walmart FLW Tour event on Lake Hartwell was one of those days – 37-degree air, 20-mph winds, rain, a water temperature that recently dropped about 6 degrees and a bite that was hot less than a week ago, yet miserably frustrating ever since.

Friday’s forecast is for rain all morning, with a possible wintry mix thrown in. That’s like your truck breaking down on the way to bury your best hunting dog – worse thrown on top of bad.

Despite all the negative chatter resulting from the weather and the tough bite, what stood out to me Thursday afternoon, after a long, frosty morning, was the positive attitude I saw from Dave Lefebre, Stetson Blaylock and Ramie Colson Jr., who seemed unfazed by the situation. They’d spent all morning out in the crud, but they were still fishing hard, executing their game plans and looking to move up the leaderboard.

Lefebre and Blaylock joked about the cold, but never complained. Colson probably would have joked too, but he was too dialed in to chat with a reporter.

On the flip side, I encountered about a half-dozen pros who seemed distracted by the cold. They were frustrated with the bite, and it appeared to me that they probably hadn’t given up on the day, but were already looking forward to putting it behind them.

So were Lefebre, Blaylock and Colson all in their “happy place” just because they were catching ’em Thursday? Maybe. After all, a kicker fish (they each had one) can warm up anyone on a cold day. Yet, I really believe their performance was the result of a couple of other things.

First, they had solid game plans that included a pattern for catching a limit of small keepers early. That’s just smart fishing when a cold front shuts down the bite. Getting those five fish in the box in the morning prevented the pressure from building in the afternoon, when the rain started falling and everyone was pushed to his limit.

The other reason I think these three pros were still going strong after lunch was their mental toughness. They were dialed in to their lizard brains – that part of a professional athlete’s mind where he’s operating on the subconscious level, oblivious to the rest of the world. How dialed in were they? Lefebre caught a limit of spots early, culled them out with largemouths and added a kicker, all before I ever finished picking my ham-and-cheese sandwich lunch meal out of my teeth. I even overheard Blaylock tell his co-angler that he’d been eying this one bluff wall all morning. So he loaded up, went there and caught a keeper that helped him cull. When you’re calling your shots like that, you’re probably dialed in on the fish.

I learned a couple of valuable lessons on the water Thursday. First, if you flip your camera over to auto mode, you don’t have to take your gloves off to operate it. Second, if you stay positive, stay focused and have a game plan specifically designed to handle the tough days, you’ll still be around when the sun shines again.

Case in point: This weekend, the weather is supposed to swing back to pleasant days with higher temperatures, and this trio of pros will probably be fishing for big money, while those who failed to handle the tough days will load their truck and head for home.