Re: Arizona Bass Fishermen's Top Stratagies
I'm in an aluminum boat only bass tournament every month.I'm good for 2 to 3 bass in a day that are worth keeping for weigh in.I have picked up a third place.How do you professional guys catch so many fish.If I am not in a tournament I will use a slip bobber and kick everyone's butts.But when it come to just chucking lures it gets tough.Give me some info please.
Here's a secret: A lot of pro tournament anglers weigh in with less than 5 fish, too. It's interesting to read ALL the results from a tournament.
If you've won third place, you did good at that tournament. Lots of others didn't do so well.
I think the secret for you will be to lose the slip-bobber and fish with tournament techniques when not in a tourmanent. Find techniques that work for you consistently and stick to them. I've never fished Arizona bass, so I don't know what you encounter there, but there are fish to be caught in many places the "pros" aren't using.
An example is in a lake I fish in Minnesota, recreationally, since I don't do tournaments. I see a lot of anglers using techniques they learned on the fishing shows, and they're often going fishless. Me? I found out that I can drag a spinnerbait or a swim jig across the top of a big weedbed on that lake and consistently catch as many keeper bass as I like. Nobody else fishes that spot with that technique. For the life of me, I can't understand why.
One of the things a lot of amateur bass fishermen do wrong is to watch TV shows, then try to use techniques shown there in the wrong places. I see it all the time on the lake. They're so tied up in their electronics and the latest equipment and baits that they're not really fishing effectively for the water they're on.
Often, they don't know what the actual forage is in the lake they're fishing, so they're picking the wrong colors and baits. Then...they're fishing where the fish aren't, instead of thinking about where those fish might be.
I watched a guy fishing for walleye for about two hours on my lake. He couldn't figure out why he wasn't catching any. Back at the dock, we talked about fishing for a while. He said that he was seeing tons of fish on his locator and tried everything on them. Well, where he was fishing at that particular time, the fish he was seeing were carp. They hang out in that particular spot most of the day in large numbers, suspending just like the walleyes do. Now, if he'd dropped a big nightcrawler on a bare hook, with a split shot about 18" above it, into that depth, he'd have been hooked up right away with a carp between five and ten pounds, and he could have kept catching them there as long as he liked. No walleye, though. They were over in the coon weed, chasing golden shiners while he was annoying the carp.
Anyhow, congrats on your third place tourney finish. Eventually, you'll win one.
