There is a point, in every young tournament fisherman's life, where they do something they know they shouldn't have done. I'm not young anymore, but I made that mistake last weekend, and it was costly. Mostly from a pride standpoint. I knew when I made the decision to fish where we were going that it was, at best, iffy. We needed a couple good fish, and I was after the big bite for sure, but more importantly, we needed 5 fish. My partner, Steve Pasker, and I talked about what we were going to do the night before after fishing all day and only having 5 keeper fish. I felt like we could go North, jump around or "run and gun" five fish. While the bite might have been light, it was decent from a weight standpoint. With the water being high, and steady, I felt like we could probably piece together a decent bag.
Then we talked about it again on the way to the ramp Sunday morning. Then we talked about it again in the boat. Each time, it was me that initiated the conversation, mostly because I wasn't feeling very good about it. As it turned out, there was good reason.
We didn't catch anything at our first stop. Nothing at the second either. Or the third, or the fourth. Steve finally hooked up with a really nice smallmouth at our fifth stop. It was more of the same after that. The fish just weren't cooperating on the North end of the pool at all. My decision was looking worse and worse by the minute, which, were ticking away much too quickly.
At some point, you just have to realize you made a mistake and head to where you think the fish might be. We went back down towards the south and stopped at a place that had been pretty good to me in the past. Nothing! We moved up the slot, stopped, first cast and POW. I hooked up with a big 3lb largemouth. Now we had two fish, still needed three more. We continued to fish hard, but nothing else came our way.
We made it back to the weigh-in and were not surprised to hear and see that there were some nice 5 fish limits. I really wanted to just crawl in my truck and get the heck out of there, so I did. While I was driving home, I replayed everything in my mind over and over only to come to the same conclusion; We fished an area on Saturday in an effort to learn more about the pool, which was the right thing to do. It was wrong, after struggling on Saturday a bit, to think Sunday would be any better. I knew where we could catch 5 fish, I wanted 5 better fish. Truth is, it there were 5 okay fish in the southern edge of the pool, then there was probably as good a chance as any that we'd run across one that was "better".
I learned it's okay to poke around that big body of water known as the Mississippi river when the lights aren't on. But when the lights come on, stick with what you know and you'll always bring five fish to the scale. Better luck next time!
