Fish Like a GIRL

One thing most non-tournament anglers don’t understand about fishing tournaments is how much of a mental game it is. When we break it down, it is really us against an animal which is said to have a brain the size of a pea. But I cannot count the number of times I have overthought a particular situation, or missed simple clues because I had a different idea stuck in my head.

I was just talking about that very thing with a friend of mine on a business meeting disguised as a fishing trip. I remember very well Chet and I fishing a tournament once early on when we first started fishing together. It was a lake I knew well and he had fished many times. But we just were not getting bites.

“Well, if the fish aren’t where we think they should be, they must be where we think they shouldn’t be,” I told him. Of course, he just laughed at me, but I meant it. As an old friend once told me, it is not like the fish can leave and go somewhere else. He had a much more colorful way of saying it, but that was the crux of his argument.

As we fished past a point where I had good luck in the past and where I knew big fish tended to come up and feed, we came to an area that was complete sand. It would not be an area we would normally fish, but I think Chet had resigned himself to the fact that we would head in with the small limit we had and that would be that, so he just kept the boat pointed in our direction of travel and I started to fish the sand. 

I did not see the certain insects that were landing on the boat before I set the hook on our first smallmouth of the day that was over three pounds. 

As he remarked that it was crazy that this “do nothing” sand flat would have fish on it, I noticed those insects. Mayflies. They were coming up out of the muck in that area. 

The smallmouth must have just figured it out as well, because they were still hungry and had yet to gorge themselves on those apparently tasty and nutritious morsels of food. We tricked a few more into biting on our offerings rather than chasing mayflies. 

This was at almost the very end of the day before we had to be back for weigh-in. Had we had more time, or had either of us realized what was happening on the lake earlier in the day, the odds are good we would have come in with an even better bag than we did. It wound up we salvaged that day in the last half an hour and came out with a respectable outcome.

That’s the thing with fishing, especially fishing tournaments. When an angler is just out fun fishing, or even when I am pre-fishing, there is no clock running and that clock can get to a tournament angler if they let it. 

That day, I was so completely stuck in “knowing” how I could catch fish that I overlooked the mayfly hatch. That may have been something, on a “fun fishing” day, that I would have caught onto much more quickly, but I had a plan, and I was bound and determined to work my plan. What we found was dumb luck, to be quite honest, but sometimes I would rather be lucky than good.

The thing about luck is that it can teach you something. When I fish that lake again at that same time of the year, you can bet that I will be looking for a mayfly hatch — but hopefully not to the exclusion of still paying attention to everything else that may be happening on the water at that time.

When my late husband Rod was alive and still healthy enough to fish, he taught me a lot about the mental game, and about staying positive. That is something I still do today. I will change up my technique or presentation every 20 minutes if I have to.

Weather also plays a part in the mental game. Rod used to say that when it was raining, you could beat half the field by just not being beat before the event started. Rain and wind make fishing a whole lot less fun. He was completely right about that. You can tell the guys who are just down and ready to give up, whether they will admit it or not, when the weather is not the best. It happens. But if you go to the ramp with the idea in your head that you are going to have a good day, it often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Preconceived notions have bitten every tournament angler at least once. I can go out to a lake and know exactly what I am going to do, and not change my mind until too late, such as in the example above. That does not happen all the time, of course. Often the plan works and we have success. But when the plan does not work, it is important to know when it is time to change it up, and to get an idea of when to change it.

One of the things I tuned into early, back when I was just fishing club tournaments as a non-boater, was  listening to how much guys were moving around. That was especially true when I was fishing out of the back of someone else’s boat and I would hear a Mercury start up and run across the lake. I knew it was Rod and I knew he was moving because he was not finding fish where he was. If I was not having a lot of luck, either, it made me feel good. He truly was one of, if not the best, angler in our club. If he was struggling, which was indicated to me by hearing that Merc running, even if I was in a place where I could not see him, it gave me hope and made me feel better about my own struggles and my boater’s struggles. Still today, when I see a lot of guys running back and forth on a lake, it can mean they are not finding fish, too. 

There are a few teams that everyone knows will do the “run and gun,” stopping at a very specific piece of cover or structure and fishing just a certain thing. They know in 10-15 casts if what they are looking for is there. If not, they are off to the next spot. But when a lot of teams are moving around a lot, and I am experiencing a tough bite on what I am fishing, I know it is not just me. In a way, it makes a hard day of fishing much better. I still feel like I am competitive and in the mix to cash a check if I am not the only one struggling.

I could go on and on about fishing your strengths and how important it is to have several confidence baits. Perhaps that will be a topic for another time. But confidence baits can be game changers. I can catch a ton of fish on a bait that another guy might never even throw. The difference is only that I have confidence in that bait and the other angler would never think to throw it. They have their own confidence baits for certain conditions.

Tournament fishing is definitely a mental game. If you can keep yourself in check and keep an open mind, that will likely bode well for you. Of course, that is easy to say as I sit here at my desk writing this column. It is a different animal when a person is on the water, battling whatever elements may be out there, from weather to boat traffic, with the thought of what other anglers might be doing as well as the clock that is ticking. That is a different feeling. It is a great feeling, don’t get me wrong, but anglers who can control their own minds have a leg up on the field.

Beckie Gaskill may be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].