Zach's Pages

Monday, September 24, 2018

Alabama Bass Trail 2018: Year in Review


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This first year in the Alabama Bass Trail was humiliating at times, frustrating most of the time, and occasionally fun. It was certainly rewarding, and not in terms of  checks cashed, 'cause there was only one of those. 

Entering this year, the game plan was to cash three Top 40 checks. I had Pickwick, Wheeler, and Logan-Martin circled. Why those lakes, you ask? Pickwick in February can be tough, for sure. But I've spent a fair amount of the winter months on February and the lake sets up well for a versatile fisherman. Of course, that tournament was moved until this weekend. More on that later. 

Josh and I fish Wheeler typically once a week. I've also had a lot of success on Wheeler in 
April. We know that lake. We've been very, very successful fishing it. Of course, my engine blew up on the run to the dam for a pattern that the tournament was won doing, we ended up having to be DQ'd. Then there is Logan-Martin, which actually went exactly like I expected and we almost cracked a Top 20 finish, hitting 13 pounds and a 21st finish. 

ABT on Guntersville was a roll of the dice and we came up snake eyes. No big surprise. One day I will figure that lake out. 

ABT on Weiss wasn't great, but we did OK for our very first time on the lake. Heck, at least we had five!

Anyway, months passed and Josh, Brad, and I had teamed up for a pretty solid tournament year outside of the ABT. Heck, the last year has been fantastic, in terms of our growth as tournament fishermen. I've hit a lot of personal bests. 

But these bigger tournaments have been another beast for me and this Pickwick tournament was probably the biggest and best learning experience I've had. So let me tell you our plan, what we did, and what we learned.

The first thing we learned from the very first ABT/Guntersville tournament was that a single day of prefishing before the tournament isn't enough. You really need three consecutive days on the Tennessee River to be competitive, especially if Guntersville isn't your lake of choice. Now, for you older gentlemen, you can rely on decades of experience, something that we don't have. We have to have time on the water.

Second thing we learned was, you have to read the conditions. For example, we had two solid spots for the Guntersville event. TVA dropped the water level several feet over night and we didn't pay it any attention. As a result, we were shocked to find that our submerged grasslines were now completely out of the water. Our game plan was busted before we even blasted off as boat number seven and we didn't even know it. 

Third thing we learned was, you will never junk fish into a win. We've won a ton of little tournaments "just getting a limit." There is no winning a 225 boat tournament against very competitive anglers by "just getting a limit." So, with that said, have a game plan and live or die by it, cause you ain't gonna luck into 20-plus pounds "just winging it." 

On a related note, you can't have too many spots and you need to vary them. Again, in the former case, our two spots were essentially the same pattern and so both were equally effected by conditions. Had we varied our pattern, we might have had a few options. 

Lakes like Weiss, Neely-Henry, and Logan-Martin can give you a false sense of security because the difference between average and great isn't much. An average fisherman can catch 8-10 pounds without a problem and a good fisherman catches 10-12 pounds. But a great fisherman comes in with 12-16 (or more). That doesn't seem like much, especially for Tennessee river fishermen who are used to seeing the spread in weights go from 10-30 pounds. Because of this, we believed we were more competitive on the Coosa than we really were. Still, we were at our best on lakes not predicated on current.

Current-driven lakes were bad to us this year and led to some terrific lessons, such as those we learned on Pickwick.

Off the bat, you can't help your blast off and weigh in times, but it is something that you have to plan around, and not just in terms of your first spot. That's because of the other unknown: TVA. In the case of Pickwick, we found some schools of fish, but because of our weigh in time and when TVA turned the current on, we had lost that tournament before we left the harbor. Instead of kicking the current up at 9AM, they ramped up at 11 which meant our fish wouldn't have turned on for several more hours, potentially even AFTER our weigh in. 

So, that's a contingency you have to plan around. We saw a lot of that during the ABT/Pickwick. More than 30 boats were sharing three places and we wondered why that was, when there were tons of good ledges another five miles down river. The answer is, it's better to share 20 biting fish than to have 100 fish that refuse to bite. 

I had a great time fishing this trail and I am signed up to do it against next year. This isn't the first time we've faced a learning curve. Just a few years ago, Brad and I joined a larger club than we used to fish and got kicked in the teeth all year before slowly becoming one of the most competitive boats in the club the last few seasons. I expect us to do a much better job, though we can't much help how much time we will have on the water. Until then, we will get as much time on the water as possible.
By February of next year, there will be seven kids between the three of Josh, Brad, and I. My fishing time has dropped dramatically since we had three kids playing sports, two of them playing two sports at a time AND I am coaching a travel team, which you can read about in my Confessions of a Travel Ball Coach
 


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