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!!!