Tournament Strategies for a Beginner

[IowaBasser]

I consider myself a pretty good fisherman, but not a tournament fisherman. I've only fished 2 tournaments; both on a 500 acre private lake with about 15 two-man teams. To fish these tournaments, one person must be a home-owner on the lake (my Dad, who prefers to fish for walleye over bass.) So everyone entered is very familiar with the lake. My first tournament was 4 years ago on April 1st. It was freakin' cold! How cold? ...at 7:00 am it was 28 degrees, cloudy, windy and spitting rain. Ice formed on my line as I reeled in. It never got above 34 degrees that day and we caught zero fish. Half the teams failed to catch a single fish, but about 5 teams weighed in a 4-fish limit.

The second tournament was last weekend, Sept. 25th. (It took 4 years to talk my dad into entering another tournament) The temperature was in the mid-50's with medium to light rain all day. The water temp was 67 and the fish were hitting! We caught 40 or 50 bass in 7 hours. Our 4-fish limit weighed in at 9.1 lbs and our big fish was 2.7 pounds. We finished 9th out of 15 teams.

Most of the teams we talked to had similar luck. It seems everyone caught 40+ fish. Almost every boat had a 4-fish limit weighing between 8.5 and 11 pounds. The second place team had 3 fish similar to everyone else with a 4.6 pounder for a total weight of 11.5 pounds.

The winning team had 14.2 pounds with a large fish of 5.1 pounds. Their smallest fish was the size of our largest fish.

I'm guessing this is a pretty normal result for a tournament: everyone catching their limit of fish between 2 and 3 pounds with the winning teams catching one or two exceptional fish. What was abnormal is that the winning team only caught 15 fish total while everyone else caught almost three times the number of fish. This tells me that the winning team had to be doing something different than everyone else. Most people were pounding the shoreline. Most bass we caught were within 2 feet of the shoreline. The bait didn't seem to matter all that much. We caught our fish on Texas-rigged plastic worms and crawfish, top water retrieving plastic frogs, or bass jigs with a plastic worm trailer. Something dark with a little orange or chartreuse worked best for us. I did see other teams having success with chartreuse spinner baits and tiger-fire stick baits. I can't stop wondering what the winning team was doing different that they only caught 15 bass. Also, the team that won has finished 1st or 2nd in 4 out of the last 5 tournaments.

I know there are millions of variables in tournament fishing - I'm just trying to plan a better strategy for next time. I don't want to do the same thing everyone else is doing and finish somewhere in the middle again. Help!!!

[rrw4258]

If you have time before the tournament, try to get out and find a general area where there is a concentration of fish. Disect that area and try to find a spot within a spot, which may be a rock pile on a hump, or a deeper section of a weedbed, etc. Try to pattern fish on a certain kind of structure or cover and see if the bigger fish are coming on certain types of a structure. Pay attention to where your fish are coming from (windblown points, shady side of a bush, etc.) Also, try looking at deeper water with a graph or if it is aviable, side imaging. Try to find a sweet spot that holds a larger concentration of fish, and look for different things in an area that will hold the better sized fish.

Also, once a limit is in the boat, try upsizing your bait to catch bigger fish. If you were catching fish on a 7" worm, try going to a 10" worm to try to get a bigger fish to bite. Or try moving from a small shallow diving crankbait to a larger size bait that dives the same depth.

Ryan

[cassidyta]

Ryan pretty much nailed it. I would however say that the sweet spots often hold many clone fish.
When I am looking for a kicker fish, I tend to look for smaller pieces of structure. I want a spot that will only hold one fish because I believe that one is generally the fish big enough to run the others out. I look for cut outs in the rocks, or sometimes the lone rock or reed that is sticking up.
While I throw a lot of swimbaits, I don't always feel that bigger bait is the key. IMO location is more important to getting the bigger fish.

[IowaBasser]

I know I made a huge mistake. I didn't do any practice fishing. The lake is 2 hours from where I live. I had planned to get to the lake a day early and look for some deeper suberged stumps, try to locate fish on deeper creek channels and find those "spots within a spot." However I needed to do some things at home before I left to keep the girlfriend happy and I lost my practice day. Also, my dad with whom I fish these tournaments prefers to fish for walleye - typically he's not that interested in bass and I have to talk him into doing anything besides trolling crank-baits at 17 feet, his preferred method of walleye fishing second only to slip bobber fishing with leeches from his dock! ...So though he is very familair with the lake, he's normally not fishing for bass, much less looking for those sweet spots that hold larger bass.

I get down to this lake 7 or 8 times a summer, usually with family or friends who aren't as serious about fishing. They like to water-ski and inter-tube. The younger kids like to swim and catch sunfish. When I do go fishing, I'm usually teaching someone to fish (either kids or adult friends who normally don't fish) ...I typically do the easiest thing to catch bass; throw a plastic worm around docks or weed edges. I'm familiar enough with the lake, but haven't spent enough time with the depth finder. I vowe to do the homework before the next tournament!

[cassidyta]

Homework is key, but your real lesson from it should be structure. Be carefull not to fall in love with a bait during your prefishing. this has been the downfall of almost every tournament guy I know. If the variables change (weather patterns, water temp, depth, and clarity, or even moon phase) then your go to bait might not do you much good.

[IowaBasser]

I said we caught 40+ fish, but that was probably conservative; it might have been closer to 60 fish, all close to shore. The bite was unreal! That's what made the situtation so difficult - we were catching fish everywhere on everything. It was hard to stop what we were doing and try something else. At the very least we should have up-sized our lures to minimize strikes from those 8 inchers. Most of fish the fish weighed between 1 and 1-1/2 lbs with an occassional 2 pound fish. That's why I was wondering if we should have abandoned the shore-line fishing once we had our limit and looked deeper for a bigger fish.

Basically we (and 13 of the other 15 teams) had a good pattern for smaller fish, but didn't catch enough big ones. Perhaps we should have tried the deep weed edge where we caught the small ones or even gone deeper to creek channels.

[Dominic]

40-60 fish is a fantastic and fun day, but......
If your really looking to win or do well, you might have to abandon the pattern your using and find something out of the way or different. Like some have said, a hump or isolated weed bed, submerged brush, a ledge, etc. Something not many know about. On a small lake like that it might be hard, but there is definitely a sweet spot there. Deep weed edges and channel bends are excellent places to look. Football jigs deep, or even a 4" worm on a deep edge are good baits to try. If you can get them deep, try the thickest shallow pads, brush or structure. Something other might not want to get involved with.
Patience is key. You never know.

[gonefishin3]

The winning team probably located isolated structure where most people dont fish and probably used way bigger worms.

[BassBandit]

Or they cheated.

[IowaBasser]

Yeah... This lake is where I do most of my fishing. It's easily the best lake for largemouth that I've fished in central Iowa. (There is a slot-limit on this lake, you can only keep fish between 12 and 15 inches) Fish between 1-1/2 pounds (15") and 2-1/2 pounds (17") are the norm, with fish up to 5-1/2 pounds. I know that might be small for some of you guys in the South, but for Iowa that's pretty good! Also this fall they are stocking a hundred 20" Muskie - not sure how that will affect the bass fishing? Also we don't have shad. Blue-gills are really the only thing close to bait fish for the bass to feed on.

Anyway, I'm a little embarrassed that I haven't spent some time with the depth-finder looking for a few sweet spots.

[IowaBasser]

OK... this thread is becoming more about finding structure in deeper water. At least that's what I've decided my major problem is; and by deeper water I'm talking anything I can't visually see, probably 6 feet to 20 feet.

Let me re-cap: this lake is man-made (40 years old) about 500 acres and 40 feet deep at it's deepest point. The shores are 95% rip-rap to minimize erosion with houses and docks around 75% of the lake. The spillway keeps the lake at a relatively constant depth only rising a foot or two at the most with super heavy rains. Within a day or two the water level is back to normal. The constant water level produces very defined weed lines near 8 feet of water.

I do pretty good fishing the weedlines in the summer, but as the days get shorter, the weed beds are decaying and the distinct line is less apparent. Still there are fish in the weeds, but not on the weedline like they are in summer.

I was reading a thread on side-imaging sonar. It looks really helpful in finding the submerged structure. I'm really bad at finding submerged structure with a traditional depthfinder. Do any of you guys use side-imaging?

[IowaBasser]

Whoa... didn't realize side imaging was THAT expensive. I thought they were around $1,000