Scout Your
Schools
First choice, second choice, third
choice, backup schools of bass – learn
how to identify your best prospects
and deal with them all when opportu-
nities are presented.
“When I really started tournament
fishing, we could fish a tournament at
Pickwick and run to 10 or 12 holes a
day,” Lambert says. “If they weren’t bit-
ing, you could come back and get
them when they were. Nowadays,
that’s not the case. If you leave a hole
now, chances are that you aren’t going
to get it back in a big tournament.”
Lambert’s solution to this develop-
ment is to spend practice days idling
at a snail’s pace while his electronics
scour the river bottom for ledges and
schools. Here, he’s mostly deploying
side-scan imaging to pinpoint as
many fish as possible in as many
areas as possible.
According to Lambert, electronics
are the most important part of it.
“I’ll make a few casts during prac-
tice, but only a few,” he says. “In three
days, I might spend three hours with a
rod in my hand.”
Once Lambert finds a school, he
marks it on his graph and keeps
rolling. Come tournament time, he’ll
run back to see if the fish are still
there, or if they’ve moved up or down
the ledge.
Lambert is quick to note that many
of the fish he locates in practice relo-
cate when tournaments begin. When
they do, he keeps moving from way-
point to waypoint and checking up and
down ledges until he finds them again.
It’s not a perfect process, but doing
the research ahead of time at least
provides an angler with starting points
for when the competition begins.
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FLWFISHING.COM I MAY-JUNE 2017