After all, you've spent pre-fishing time on the water and found bass, determined their food sources, and dialed in their travel routes. You now only have to go where they are and give 'em what they want.
Following blastoff, you arrive at your first hot spot, and it looks great. A big grin crosses your face as you walk to the bow and drop the trolling motor. As usual, your first cast is out in the middle because you're a bit superstitious about catching a bass on the first cast of a tournament. Your second and third casts with a frog don't produce. On your fourth cast, though, a nice 3-pounder engulfs it, but as you're bringing it to the boat, it jumps free, and your frog comes flying back at you.
"No biggy," you muse. "This just proves the bass still are here. And besides, that bass wasn't one of the 4-pounders I need to make a 20-pound stringer." As an afterthought, however, you admit to yourself that it would have been nice to put your hands on the 3-pounder.
The morning proceeds to become a torment of bass-tournament failure. Bass after bass come off in the slop you're fishing. Six strikes later, you've only managed to put one 2-pound bass in the boat. You keep verifying your hooks are sharp and then start analyzing the mechanics of your hooksets. Are they too fast? Too slow? Too weak? Sideways versus vertical?
All kinds of thoughts are now racing through your head, and eventually your confidence plummets. You continue missing one strike after another. You stop to change frog color, style and actions, but nothing seems to matter.
"These bass want a frog and don't care what it looks like," you say to yourself. "I just can't keep them buttoned."
With the sun high in the sky and your confidence in the toilet, you're now four hours into the tournament and have just one small bass in the livewell to show for two-limits worth of hookups. Time for a change.
"I spent too much time on a failing hollow-body-frog bite, and my options are quickly dwindling," you think. "I need a viable pattern to cover a lot of water and find four hungry bass to at least fill a limit."
Since it's fall, and the bass are feeding heavily on shad, you pick up your favorite squarebill crankbait and start hitting shallow-water ambush points. Your torment only mounts, however, as you quickly hook...but lose...three quality bass before you can get them in the net. At this point, you honestly feel the only person to beat you in this tournament is yourself. You do a quick check of hook sharpness, verify you're using the proper equipment and realize the only thing that's left at this stage is fundamentals.
As a last-ditch effort, you head across the lake to a spot where you found several 2-pound bass holding during your prefishing. They aren't home, though...not a surprise since you're likely the fourth or fifth boat to pound that school of fish.
At 1 p.m., you still have only one bass in your livewell, and you've exhausted all your fall patterns for this lake. With two hours remaining, you decide to trust what you learned in your prefishing and head back to your starting area. You know bigger bass are using this area. After all, that's the reason you started there.
"If I can manage to hook and land just a couple of them, I can salvage the day and make a decent showing at weigh-in" is your thought.
Once there, however, the same luck that doomed you to start the day picked up right where it had left off. The first bass to hit your frog stays hooked up just long enough for you to know it was a quality fish and then pulls free. Two casts later, you finally land one--a solid 3-pounder. This fish sends your confidence level back through the roof, but you know you don't have time to risk losing more bass to bad hookups, bad hookset timing, or rod position. All of these strikes were coming from specific locations in the slop, so you pick up a punch rig and start punching the slop in areas where you would expect a hollow-body frog strike.
With renewed confidence and a technique you were born to fish, you proceed to catch a bass every 10 minutes the last two hours of the tournament. Culling several times, you manage a decent stringer and finish in 4th place.
"I never did find those 4 pounders I was looking for," you say to yourself, "but 3 pounders were enough to earn a paycheck... . When I conceded to just catch a couple of bass in the final two hours, it all came together."
And in reality, the day was tough for everyone. A 17-pound sack won the event.
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