Come Day 1 of the tournament, however, his plan immediately started falling apart. The first spot he hit, his best producer during practice, didn't give up a single fish in a whole hour. Nearly each successive spot produced the same results. With just 15 minutes remaining of the fishing day, this angler had only two quality fish in the livewell.
In desperation, he grabbed a wacky-rigged worm, the one bait that had been a steady producer over the years, and almost immediately caught another keeper. The three fish he weighed that first day came in at 7 lbs. 15 ozs., which placed him in 102nd place out of 196 fishermen.
On Day 2, before the boats even had taken off, this fella told his co-angler to tie on a wacky-rigged worm, with a promise that "it will catch hordes" of fish, and it did. Among a crowd of boats in an area that had failed to produce a single fish on Day 1, this team caught more than 20 keeper bass. And they made it look easy. Cast the worm out, let it hit bottom, lift the rod up from the 9 o'clock position to the 2 o'clock position, and repeat all the way back to the boat. The fish ate it up this way all day long.
The process even worked with small schools of bass that began surfacing as the day wore on. These two anglers would toss their wacky rigs at those schools, let them sit for about 10 seconds, then lift, and more times than not, a fish already would have swallowed the bait.
At the end of Day 2, the front-seater weighed a limit that tipped the scales at 13 lbs. 9 ozs., which was good enough to move him up 41 spots and finish in 61st place. He was proud but also regretful that he hadn't started Day 1 with the most valuable bait in his arsenal tied on then, too.
If a bait has proven itself to be a steady producer over the long haul, never go into competition without it rigged and ready to do battle.
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