Learning From My Mistakes

Riding the rookie-year roller coaster

My rookie campaign on the FLW Tour is starting to feel like quite the roller-coaster ride. After my lackluster 156th-place debut on Lake Guntersville, a roller-coaster reference isn’t the worst thing in the world. It means I’m thankful to have found a way to climb back up the hill at the second stop in Texas, where I finished 27th at Lake Travis.

To be honest, I had mixed emotions going into Guntersville. I fished hard and managed to have better practice days than I did actual tournament days, but to be frank, I approached the entire tournament like a rookie. I went into Guntersville convinced I needed 17 to 20 pounds a day to be competitive, no matter how tough the bite was. How could you blame me? Every major event in the last decade has taken mega-weight to be a player.

Though my practice was slow, size was never the issue. Getting the bites, on the other hand, was tough. All through practice I found myself running grass and trying to find that mother lode by chucking a lipless crankbait. When practice time was running out and I wasn’t finding them in the grass, I went and looked deep. Another mistake. I should have gone shallower – ultra-shallow, actually.

I fished like a rookie because my inexperience had me chasing a bite that I thought I should be doing and not necessarily fishing to my strengths and utilizing the skills that got me here. Instead of keeping a jig in my hand and pitching every piece of hard cover in high-percentage prespawn areas for eight bites a day, I was out there trying to throw a lipless crankbait and hang with dudes that have done it their entire life and were taught by their grandpa back in the day.

Being 100 percent honest, it sure was tough trying to drag a lipless through the grass like a Texas-rigged worm when I wasn’t truly convinced there was even a bass in that mess of grass anyway.

Starting the season out catching only one bass over two days obviously isn’t ideal, and though I may be a rookie on the Tour, I’ve still competed in my share of tournaments and have endured both failures and successes on the water. This one really didn’t mess with me too bad. I know where I messed up, and I know what I should have been doing. I just wanted to get back on the water and get that horrible taste out of my mouth. I took it for what it was – a $4,000 lesson.

Lucky for me, our next stop was on Lake Travis, and after a few days of fun fishing and a day or two of travel, I made it into one of the coolest cities I’ve ever been – Austin, Texas.

Practice for me sounded a lot like practice for everyone else: It was slow on the big bite, and finding keepers was tough, but no doubt there was an abundance of 8- to 13-inch bass biting. It kept me busy because no matter how shallow, how deep, what lure you threw or the type of cover, I was still just catching a bunch of dinks.

I found a 10-mile stretch of the lake that I thought presented the best quality and the best types of areas that could hold multiple patterns. I’ve learned what works best for me is to locate an area of the lake that I like and figure out different ways to catch bass from there. The only time I have zero percent chance of catching a bass is when I’m running the big engine and not casting.

The patterns that worked well for me through practice were throwing small finesse jigs at rocky points and secondary points outside spawning areas and catching suspended bass out of the deep trees by either casting an Outkast Tackle Pro Swim Jig through the branches or vertically dropping on them with the Biovex Kolt Shad Tail. I also had some success pitching shallow bushes and casting weightless baits to isolated shallow brush.

Day one of the tournament started a bit sloppy with missed opportunities and dropped fish. I went out looking to catch 30 to 40 bass, but was hoping to scrape together a limit for a mere 10 or 11 pounds. I figured about 10 pounds a day would get you paid, but if I was lucky enough to bag a true Texas giant then I would be in the upper end of the pack. After a tough bite in general, I fished sloppy enough to miss out on a limit and had no kicker, so I sat at the bottom of the pack looking up.

On day two things started quickly when I boated two good keepers drop-shotting a deep tree. After running around most of the day – still only catching short fish – I picked up an Outkast Tackle Juice Jig and went to the bushes. I remembered what I learned from Guntersville, and with only a couple hours to go I caught two solid fish, as well as a Texas kicker to jump up and finish in a solid 27th place.

The area of the lake I opted for had a nice warm breeze blowing in and was mostly rock, making the water temp soar up into the mid-50s. The female bass were staging halfway in and holding tight to the bushes, and the bucks were suspended out in trees. At one point my co-angler got bushed by a solid one up shallow that we both got a good look at. That was all I needed to see, and after that I never looked deep again. 

It was pretty cool to make that big of a jump, and I’m thrilled to have cashed my first FLW Tour check. Ten grand goes a long way for a guy like me.