One of the most difficult questions in tournament bass fishing is: How do you know when you're on fish? Weekend tournament anglers constantly wonder about this. Do the pros?
BassFan.com asked perennial top-ranked angler Mark Davis, who always seems to find fish, and found out that he didn't have a cut-and-dried answer to the question either.
"That's one of the toughest parts of fishing," Davis says. "So many times, whether you're a novice or a pro, you go out there and catch some fish, but knowing the difference between actually being onto something or it being a fluke – or you caught fish and you can't necessarily hang your hat on it, and whether you can repeat in that area – is tough.
"A lot of it is analyzing the lake or water you're fishing. Is it a lake or river, and are bass abundant there? If they are, and you get a bite doing a certain thing, then it's possible it will hold up. But many times in tournament fishing, you realize that when you go into an area and catch a bass – whether in practice or the tournament, and whether you release that fish or take it to the weigh-in – you leave that area knowing there's little hope of going back and catching additional fish there."
On the tours, he notes that "a lot of the water that we fish is incapable of producing fish 2 days in a row (in the same spots)."
But even though he thinks that evaluating the water you're fishing is the first step to being able to tell whether you're on fish, "so many different variables are there that it's hard to come up with a general statement that covers all of them.
"A lot comes only with experience. That's the God's honest truth – the intuition you have of whether you can go back there and repeat or make it work again."
Even so, "with the years of experience I have, I still find myself buffaloed by these fish. I'll go back and think I'll catch them and they're not there, and I don't have a good reason why they changed or aren't there. It's so many things: timing, feeding periods, weather changes. The fish might still be there, but you have to make some technique change or lure change and don't adapt to get a bite."
When You Definitely Know
Even though all anglers struggle with the "am I or am I not on fish" question, most know when the planets align and they're on enough fish to win or do well in a tournament. Davis is no different.
"I'm always thinking multi-day," he says. "Can I catch these fish 3-4 days in a row? And there are definitely days, especially in the spring and fall/winter, when the conditions are more conducive for them to feed.
"For instance, during the practice period of a tournament, I'm always looking at the long-range weather forecast. I'm hoping that for one day out of three we'll get low pressure or pre-frontal conditions so the fish will be active. If you don't get one good day to find fish when they're active, a lot of times you don't find fish or you find very little," he notes.
"But I know when I'm on fish when I find them during good conditions, and then I check back during the bad conditions and the fish are still there. There may not be as many, but you still have the lure, the technique, the depth – everything figured out and the fish haven't moved.
"In other words, they're biting under all weather conditions. That's when you definitely know you're on fish. Anything less than that and you're in trouble because you never know what the weather will do to you."
Spots vs. Patterns
Even though Davis' comments indicate that good multi-day spots are hard to find, many big tournaments are won off spots.
"Usually when a guy wins, he wins off a spot or an area," he says. But usually it's more than just one spot. "Maybe it's one key spot that gives up the bulk of the fish, but the surrounding area, where you can pick up a few more fish, adds to that spot. That's how most tournaments are won nowadays.
"With the amount of boats and knowledge fishermen have now, it's hard to win running a pattern. You see exceptions to that sometimes, but not often because several anglers figure out (the main) pattern, and they're all running it and bumping into each other. That makes it less reliable.
"I like to have a school of fish located, meaning a spot or area where a lot of fish are located," he says. "To go along with that I always like to have a pattern, or maybe 3-4 patterns. In other words, I like to have at least two ways to catch bass in a tournament."
That's because "the chances are that if you found a spot or area, you're sharing it with someone. But if you have that with a pattern or two, you have a better chance of being able to put together a string of fish during the day.
"So knowing those patterns is very important. Not necessarily for winning a tournament – the guy with the best spot might go on and win. But if your spot gets covered up with boats and you have some (fallback) patterns, you can have a good finish and can come away with good Classic points or points toward winning Angler of the Year."
What's a Good Spot?
"The water we fish varies so much," Davis says. "When we go to really good lakes, like Guntersville, Okeechobee, Rayburn and those-caliber waters, I feel confident of finding good areas – a school of fish with 100-plus bass.
"When we go to lakes that aren't so good, I realize that those giant schools of bass probably aren't going to exist. So you're reduced to finding smaller schools of fish, or trying to pick them off one at a time pattern-fishing or fishing isolated cover."
He adds: "The old way of fishing that so many of us have done, where you run over here to this little school and get your limit – weights anywhere from 7-10 pounds – and then go hunt big fish, many times (that strategy) doesn't exist on some of the waters we're fishing nowadays. Instead you will put forth every effort you can all day long to try to come up with 10 pounds.
"That option of catching a quick and easy 10-pound limit isn't possible in most places, so the way that we fish I think has changed somewhat.
"And on the tour, we don't really necessarily fish in the season where fish are schooled up, like we used to. We're looking at more pre-spawn and spawn tournaments. Summer and fall are really when fish are schooled up, so a lot of those things don't even come into play anymore."
