Bass Digest/January, 2014
What do you do before a tournament, in terms of preparation or when fishing an unknown venue like Boskop?
Practise, practise and practise. You can go to the dam today and tomorrow it will be off.
My preparation consists of 3 main criteria:
- Take note of the season and fish accordingly. I start with the seasonal patterns, for example:
000000- Spring – beds, bedding fish, rocks and the 000000))shallows
000000- Summer – weird time as you can basically 0000000catch them in most places
000000- Winter – fish slow and deep
000000- Autumn – bays etc.
000000- Mapping, this will help me identify river ))000000- channels, rocks, reeds, grass etc. Then I would 000000- take this info and spend a day or two 000000- 000000- preparing, find a pattern relating to rocks or 000000- whatever, and then I should be ready for a 000000- tournament. Nothing replaces spending time 000000- on the water.
The famous Gary Player’s quote is also relevant: “The more I fish the luckier I get” (he also says for golf that “a tree is 90% air”). I also tend to start shallow then work deeper ……… (Oooh spoonpluggers would like the sound of that)
Your fishfinders – how crucial are they in your preparation?
They are very crucial indeed. One of my favourite things is, when I find something I like, I can mark it on the finder, mark various waypoints and then come back at a later stage and fish it. Sometimes I get lucky, other times not. But without it, I would never get lucky.
Sometimes you can see the difference between hard and soft surfaces, where there is underwater grass or trees. It especially helps to show you where the schools of fish and baitballs are (as we saw earlier). The bass will tend to follow the bait balls, and then you can target the bass that way.
I have fished Hummingbird a lot, so I have adapted to it and I am happy with the units; however Hummingbird seem to have lost momentum with regards to the mapping aspect. Lowrance has a whole lot of maps for the dams in South Africa. Hummingbird doesn’t have many, if at all, so I have to resort to drawing my own maps, which is quite time consuming, but I enjoy it.
I have a contact in Europe where I use a programme to make my own maps, and it’s helped me quite a bit.
You can get maps on Garmin Waterways but it’s not really relevant to fishing. For instance, I’d like to see where the channel meets the shore as that way you know there’s a drop off and you can plan to fish it. So to me, accurate maps are important. The side imaging is a key feature on these units, and has helped me more than anything.
I am waiting for Hummingbird’s new units to come out and I’ll see whether there has been any improvement on their map side of things.
The other thing is that the Lowrance and Hummingbird technology is very similar, it’s the price tag that also counts.
Ever participated in tournaments, or the CFC / BETT circuit?
Yeah for sure. That first year, Richard and I were obsessed with fishing. We fished the BETT and Cast for Cash trails that year, and we did all the Classics (AFC, Inanda Classic, etc.). We just didn’t do the really far ones