Rayovac, Rayburn. Laziness and fishing for Fun vs for the Win

Posted by ken on April 21, 2015

I wrote not long ago something to the effect that I'm tired of learning lessons fishing and ready to put old lessons to use in winning. Unfortunately I demonstrated to myself at the Rayovac tournament that I still have lessons to learn. I wish I could say my poor performance was due to losing almost 3 hours day two to equipment issues, or that catching some solid post spawners in practice on a jerk bait threw me for a loop, which it did, but mostly I feel like I was mentally and physically lazy. To give you the lay of the land the lake was over 5 feet high so there was an abundance of cover in the water. If you broke through the willows and buck brush, then the thorn and sticker bushes, you could get to the hard cover, big pine trees and sweet gum trees and not only was the fishing easier, it was incredibly fun. I'm talking 40, 50, 60 bite a day fun. And I got caught up in that, even though every fish, not most fish, every fish was 2 3/4 and under. I knew the better fish were a little deeper, the first day of practice I pulled a fish between 8-12 lbs to the top off the first piece of hard cover, in this case a sweet gum tree, behind the buck brush and thorn bushes...actually I'm not sure what to call them, it was like a bail of organic barb wire laying there, really hard to get through, would literally stop a 112 MinnKota trolling motor. That was the only solid bite that day, the rest, and I looked at a lot of them, were those pound and a half and two pound fish. The third day I accidentally caught a fish that was between 5 and 6, guess where, on the first hard cover, again a sweet gum tree behind the nasty stuff. So what did I do for all the days of practice and the tournament, I fished the easy stuff where there were lots of bites...guess what I caught..lots of ound and a half and two pound fish. Now guess where all the top ten stringers were caught...