Hey guys, I'm looking for some opinions from people with a little more tournament experience and figured this was the best place to go.

I'll give a run down of the situation and then ask my questions at the end.   So some of my buddies and I have started holding a weekly fishing tournament up here in MN.  We have a wealth of small natural lakes around that we can fish, so it's on a different body of water every week.  The lakes range from about 400 acres to 3,000 acres.  We fish two guys to a boat, 5 fish per boat.  There's usually about 5-10 teams.  Here's the part that makes it kind of tough, we only get 3 hours to fish because weeknights are the only time that everyone can show up.  

So far I've been finding myself on the bottom end of the weigh-in list.  I'm starting to get a little frustrated because I feel that I'm a better fisherman than what I've been showing so far.  

So here are the things I'd love to hear some opinions on:

If you were fishing a tournament like I described, what would you do to simply try and fill your limit?  Would you run to a spot, make a few casts with a bunch of different lures and then quickly move on to another spot?  Or would you get to a spot and work it thoroughly?

I have a natural tendency to move the boat along slower and have more patience with a spot/area of the lake than a lot of guys.  Do you think this is harming my chances of catching a good bag?  Would it be more effective to keep the trolling motor busy and make fewer casts at more area instead of more casts at less area?

Would you pre-fish little lakes like this?  Or do you think I'd be smarter to find a lake that is similar nearby and fish that instead of the tournament lake, and then take what info I gathered concerning depth of fish and activity levels and try to apply it during the tournament?  This way I wouldn't be disturbing any of my spots on the tournament lake, but I'd still hopefully be able to know which spots will be more productive.  Am I on to something with this idea?  Or does it sound like crazy talk?

When you're limited on time, would you avoid big fish lures/tactics and instead take an approach that is better for numbers than for size?

I'm open to any and all advice or input anyone has, even if it has nothing to do with my questions.  Sorry I turned this post into a short novel.  Thanks in advance!

I might not have fished alot of tournaments. but in my opinion makeing multiple cast to one spot can pay of in the end. You either have to hope that they are in the mood or just simply aggreviate them to bit.

The boat that you are useing does it have any electronics?

Also what are you useing for a search bait.

sometimes useing a good search bait is all it takes to find a spot that is holding fish.

As for what I use I will use in order a spinner bait, lipless crank bait. An just recently have been useing a jig (swimming it).

Also if you have 3 hours an a partner there is no reason why the two of you cannot use some team work. what I mean is divide the water colums between the two of you, an find a pattern that will get you the bites you are looking for.

Hope this helps

memo

Thanks Memo,

Either of the two boats that I would be in have fish/depth finders.  If we use my partners boat we also have a fish finder/GPS.  In a lot of cases though they aren't as helpful on our natural lakes.  A lot of our lakes are basically a bowl.  Depth maxes out between 25 and 50 feet, weeds are pretty thick till 10 feet and then it's bare bottom.  And it's the same way all the way around the lake.  

We do try to use some teamwork, but you're right about covering different depths.  A lot of times he'll be using a jig and I'll be using a T-rig.  One of us should probably get off the bottom.

Being that it's only a 3 hour tournament, if I didn't already have some productive spots to depend on, I would cover the most amount of water that I could with a search bait.

You should always practice on the tournament lake if you have time, but when you practice, you dont have to hook everything that bites to figure out what you need to be doing.  

If there's money on the line you can pretty much bet that there are others who will be practicing. And if you cant beat 'em, join 'em.

I'm with FBL.  I put the trolling motor on high and hit as much as I can.  Even if you have 5 small bass, the time restraints will probably put you near the top.

I fish alot of these weeknight tournaments and they are the same, 3 hours.  I'll tell you the most important thing is to not experiment.  You don't have time to figure things out like you'd like to , so stick with what you know works. If you start trying crazy stuff and one, then two don't work you'll start getting panicked. I only resort to experimenting in the last hour or so if completely necessary.  Prefishing is a must, all it takes is one good spot to get you the win, its not like the weekend tourneys where you have lots of time to catch them and go lunker hunting.  I usually try to just catch as many as possible and hopefully lucks on your side and you'll get a larger one.  

I will stop and fish a place fairly throughly if I found fish there prefishing.  Still though, at most I'm only willing to give up 20-30 minutes if I really know something should be there, otherwise I keep moving.  I've did very well in them so far so my strategy seems to work, but it all depends on you really.  Some people just can't fish well unless they do it their way.   Confidence is key!

Alright guys, time for a little show and tell.

So I headed to the lake this morning with your advice lingering in my head. I was planning to practice my tournament technique a little. I started out cruising around some points tossing a spinner bait. Nothin. Moved to a little grassy island that I have caught fish on before, tried the spinner bait and a little bit with the jig, nothin. Now I'm thinking, "Here we go again. I'm on one of the best bass lakes in the area and I'm gonna get skunked. Typical."

After the grassy island had failed me, I decided I needed to get myself somewhere where I could find some warmer water. It was only about 71 on the main body of the lake, quite a drop from just a week ago. With that in mind I made my way over to a big bay that I knew wasn't very deep. I hadn't planned on going to this spot today, but it was starting to look like the only place I might find active fish.

I made my way in and continued with the spinner bait, still no luck with that, so I decided to slow down and give the old Spro frog a shot. I made a few casts, moved forward a little, made a few more casts, had one fish go for it and miss badly, but nothing much more. It didn't take me long to realize I didn't have the patience to work to the frog as well as I know I can today. So I stopped and thought for a minute or two trying to come up with a plan to get a few hits... I looked up to the sky and noticed some spotty clouds were starting to roll in. That was all I needed to see. I mumbled to myself, "Buzzzzz bait weather." And quickly tied on a medium sized orange and yellow skirted buzz bait.

My first cast finally gave me some hope. I let it fly and the instant it hit the water there was something chewing on it. I gave it a firm hook set only to see my buzz bait come flying back my direction, closely followed by (and also flying, but not hooked) one of the smaller bass I've ever seen. That got a good chuckle. You know they're small when you can sling shot them half way back to the boat when they don't even have to hook in their mouth.

I worked about 50 yards of shoreline slinging that buzz bait as far as I could, dragging it past any bit of cover I could see. Then finally I hooked up with one that weighed in at 2lb 2oz on my hand held scale. I jotted the info down in my log and kept on tossing, a little more optimistically now. I made it another 30 yards or so down the shoreline and decided to turn around to see if there was anything behind me I could try to drag it by. Good decision.

There was a few patches of matted down weeds and scum with some good alleys between them for me to weave my lure through. So as I've done a trillion times before, I dipped the rod back and let it fly. Now I should point out a little problem I have sometimes before I go anything further. I have a bad case of fisherman ADD, and sometimes don't keep my eye on my top water stuff. I start looking around wondering where my next cast will be, or just pondering any of the other endless random thoughts that go through my head on any given day. And sure enough, that's what I ended up doing during this retrieve. I was looking to my left side, just day dreaming away when I heard SPLASH. This wasn't a normal splash. This was a "no doubt whatever just made that noise is not small" kind of splash. The sound alone sent my heart into my throat. I yanked back on the rod and felt the tension. It's hooked! But what's it going to do now? There's soooo many weeds and junk down there that I'm not sure if I can keep her out of it all. That's when I saw her. Not a small fish. That heart that had just been sent to my throat was now also beating at about 40 million thuds a second. I made the quick decision to not let her play any games if I could help it. I had a 7 foot heavy rod with 40lb Power Pro on a good reel with the drag set pretty tight. She yanked me off balance a time or two, which would be expected, I'm not a big guy. Luckily I was able to keep her out of the thick stuff and get her up to the side of the boat. Got her up and in, and finally let out the breath that I'd been holding since she killed my little orange and yellow buzz bait just a minute ago.

I layed her down on the tape measure quick, somewhere around 21 inches. Maybe a little bit more. My digital scale said 5lb 9oz.

You may be wondering why I'm so excited about this. In a lot of places 5-9 isn't anything special. But I must remind you where I'm from. Up here in Minnesota our fish don't get much for a growing season, so getting one that's over 5lb in the summer is pretty special. Our state record is less than 9lb, and I'm pretty sure that was caught in the fall when our fish get especially chunky in preparation for the 3 feet of ice that will be over their heads for the next 4 months. This fish also demolished my old personal best, so it was pretty exciting.

After I got a few quick pictures (crappy ones because I was fishing by myself) and my measurements I got her back into the water. I almost forgot to kiss her, but remembered just before I let her go. Straight back down she went. After I watched her go all I could do was sit down and try to collect myself a little bit. My hands were shaking, I felt like I was gonna puke, haha, I was all messed up. I decided that was all I needed out of the day. It was starting to get hot and I was hungry, so I fished my way out of the bay, not catching anything else, and headed for home.

Sorry for the long post, but this thread was in my head all day so I figured it would be an appropriate place to share my little story.

Here are some pictures of the fish. Like I said, it's too bad I was by myself, I wasn't able to get a picture of myself holding it. Oh well. The other pics are of the bay where I caught her. The red arrow is right where I assume she came from. The next pic is what I see when I turn 90 degrees to the left, and the last one is another 90 degrees. It's a pretty sweet spot, just thought I'd show you guys.

Pics of the bay

congrats on the fatty.

Man that spot looks sweet, just looking at those pics I mentally figured out what I would use an when.

memo

Very nice report.  I would pick that bay apart for all it's worth on tourney night.  You have such a limited time that finding another spot would be pretty tough.  Search bait until you locate a few, then I'd flip the hell out of those trees.

Man, i would love to drag a Spro or Rage frog through there! Then after i have caught the active ones, out comes the flippin' stick!!!!!!          ;D

Man, i would love to drag a Spro or Rage frog through there! Then after i have caught the active ones, out comes the flippin' stick!!!!!!       ;D

my thoughts EXACTLY!  Dang I wanna fish that.

Being that it's only a 3 hour tournament, if I didn't already have some productive spots to depend on, I would cover the most amount of water that I could with a search bait.

You should always practice on the tournament lake if you have time, but when you practice, you dont have to hook everything that bites to figure out what you need to be doing.

If there's money on the line you can pretty much bet that there are others who will be practicing. And if you cant beat 'em, join 'em.

agree with 5BL too.  

If you're familiar at all with these lakes I'd definitely have a list of areas of interest.  Spots that while you may never have caught fish on, are areas that would have a higher likelihood of holding bass.  Points with cover, changes in shoreline composition (ie:rock to mud or gravel to rock)  Indentations or points in weedlines, isolated weed patches in the lake,  wood cover in areas that don't have much wood cover,  boat docks,  boat ramps, rip rap areas.  

put the TM on high and start concentrating on those areas but keep your baits and yourself moving until you find some fish.  You're basically slop fishing.  

Another quick update from me:

I think it's time for me to head to the gas station and buy some lottery tickets, because I'm on a roll lately. I took some of the advice from this thread and put it to work last night in our weekly tournament. It happened to be on a lake that between me and my parter had a combined lifetime total of 7 hours fishing on. One of the bigger and more pressured lakes in the area too. But that didn't seem to matter.

The winds were high and a storm had just rolled through. We ran to the first spot that we were going to try, after about 15 minutes of no luck I pulled the plug on that. Which is much sooner than I would normally give up on a spot, but I kept what you guys had told me in mind. Move quickly. We ran across the lake to another spot that we had seen from the road on the way to the launch. Too windy to even control the little 17 foot Ranger, even with a brand new 70lb thrust trolling motor. So we decided to cruise some docks on the calm side and see what we could make happen. Still no luck for the first 200 yards or so. Then all of a sudden we came to a stretch of pencil weeds. I started thinking out loud and said to my partner, "Man, one of use really should be throwing something that moves quick, probably a spinner bait." So he grabbed his spinner bait rod and sure enough, started catching fish. The pencil reeds lasted for about 75 yards. We started catching fish about half way through them. When we got to the end we turned around and redid the first half doing the same thing we had been doing on the second half to catch fish. It worked and we took first place by about a pound and a half.

Next week the pressure will be on. The lake we drew out of the hat is one that I've spent a lot of time on, and hardly anyone else ever even seen. So me and my partner should be heavy favorites, but like I said, being the favorite is sometimes harder than being the underdog. Hopefully we can pull it out though, turns out winning is fun ;D

Great to hear man!  Hope ya whoop em next week too!