Concentration - The Art of Bearing Down
October 13, 2008
By the time you read this I will have turned 46, with 31 years of tournament bass fishing under my belt. Each year there are two constants; with work and family I get to fish less, but with so many years of experiences with different weather and water conditions, seasonal patterns, fishing pressure etc., I continue to catch more fish and cash more checks. What sometimes confounds me is something I experience in my golf game as well; the more I play, the worse I play. Something about letting what’s between my ears get between me and my ability to play or fish my best.
If you happen to enjoy a good sports psychologist there’s a guy by the name of Dr. Bob Rotella who works with a number of PGA tour pros. He’s also written several fascinating books which look into the professional athlete’s psyche. I submit to you that other than a 6 day game of cricket (actually not sure how long they play but I know it’s multiple days) there are few sports that require extremely long periods of concentration like tournament golf and tournament fishing.
Dr. Rotella talks a lot about managing that concentration, as in fact although a round of golf for a professional golfer is usually about 4 ½ hours, the actual time spent hitting a golf ball, in a good round, is about 210 seconds (70 ball strikes at about 3 seconds per). Therefore a golfer must learn to stay focused and loose for very long periods of time, spending just a few seconds every 10 minutes or so at a high level of concentration.
Although we make cast after cast after cast and therefore must concentrate for most of the day we fish, some of that is autopilot. When the thing we seek actually happens (a bite), the ability to remain focused for just those 5-10 seconds is extraordinarily crucial. I’m not talking about the time spent setting the hook and putting that fish in the boat. If you are (or want to be) a serious tournament fisherman that part of the game must be instinctual. If you don’t play and land fish in practice like you do in a tournament you are badly shortchanging yourself.
Face it, there is NO better way to hone any skill than practice, so why would you treat a practice day 2-pounder differently than a 4-pounder with three minutes left in a tournament? Sorry but I must digress here, how many guys have you heard comment that they never lose a fish in practice but usually do in a tournament? Why? They take their time in practice and rush fish in a tournament.
Watch KVD play a fish, or interestingly, Todd Faircloth, the runner-up for angler of the year. They’re calm, instinctual, and they very seldom lose a fish. They do have the advantage of catching 50+ tournament day fish for every one we weekend tournament guys do, so they have more “in game practice”, but you and I can hone that same skill by treating every fish hooked as one we have to put in the boat (other than the occasional one you’re hiding from a potential competitor).
The crucial concentration on a bite is where and why. Fish are simple creatures of nature; they don’t “outsmart” us. However they also do not read fishing books. Therefore if you catch a fish somewhere, on something, that fish was there for a reason.
Case in point: Lake Tawakoni, just east of my home in Dallas. It’s a large, flat, featureless lake surrounded by boat docks. I’ve spent a great deal of time on it over the last 20 years with more than a fair amount of success. In July I fished a tournament there - air temp was 103 degrees at noon, water temp about 85. The lake is a great striper/sand bass lake, but as is the case with many Texas lakes where there are large concentrations of stripers and sandies, it is extremely difficult to catch any kind of main lake, deep water structure fish.
It seems that the bass either can’t or won’t compete for those spots with the thousands of sandies. Therefore my success in the summer there has revolved around boat docks or brush piles in 10 feet of water or less. The water under the docks is typically several degrees cooler, the baitfish congregate around them and typically the sandies aren’t as thick.
As is typical I only got to prefish the day before the tournament and did what I’ve always done there, cranked and flipped docks. I probably caught 30 fish, not even one single keeper. I tried some offshore stuff, as usual lots of sinker bites and sandies on crankbaits, still no help. I did find some lily pads in about six feet of water late in the day with baitfish in them, so I decided to start my day there. Who doesn’t love starting a tournament on a place where you’ve never caught a keeper?
So there I was the next day, two hours into the morning and had experienced a couple of blow ups without even a short fish in the boat. Thirty-plus years of tournament fishing tell me to go back to how I’ve caught them here before, docks and brush piles, which I do.
At 11:57 am I have no keepers and absolutely get a lucky break (I didn’t say I thought this out like Einstein). I swing around a long dock on a point and fire a crankbait all the way to the bank along the dock walkway. Two handle cranks and the rod loaded up; the fish runs at me, by the boat, pulls a little drag and is gone. I’ll admit that my first reaction was that I pulled my crankbait across the back of a drum and snagged him and that’s why he pulled off, but sometimes a big drum is more fun than a ten-inch bass.
I reload and make the exact same cast, similar result; the rod loads but this time whatever I’ve hooked immediately turns and goes under the dock around a barnacled metal pole and exits stage left with my Bandit 200. I’m still thinking drum, but something feels right. I pick up a Senko and pitch it into the shade of the walkway, maybe 10 inches deep. Finally, a 3-pounder in the box. Over the course of the next 2 ½ hours (all the time I had left) I hooked and saw or caught nine fish over four pounds, only one of which was in over a foot of 80+ degree water.
Any fishing book generally recommends you don’t stay that shallow when the water gets that hot, so why were they there? Especially when there were many docks with brush under them in five to nine feet of water and pads with six feet of water and baitfish? I’ve seen this before at Lake of the Ozarks in the fall when the water cools but never in Texas.
On some of the docks on Tawakoni the dock owners stack rocks as breakwater, especially around their walkways, to stop erosion. When I eased up shallow there were three to six-inch gizzard shad up there literally with their backs out of the water feeding on the algae growing on the rocks.
For the rest of the day I could call my shot, the fish were using the shady side of the walkway as access and ambush points to the gizzard shad, it may have been the most exciting afternoon of fishing I’ve had in the last five years, and from the tournament results I’m the only guy who figured it out.
Admittedly, I got lucky, but I got the one thing I needed: a bite. However, I was also concentrating. After a day and a half of no keepers I still had my focus and got a “read” from that bite. In my seminars I’ve often talked about fishing being like a jigsaw puzzle - to put it together you need to start with the corner pieces, a clue, and from there you fill in the picture and the more parts you get into the puzzle the easier the puzzle gets.
Sometimes you need to think outside the box, or as I heard someone say today at a seminar in Chicago, “throw away the box”. Do something radical, something you wouldn’t normally do because sometimes the jigsaw puzzle doesn’t have any corners. Some of them are round.