Entry 113-1

George Cochran On How To Overcome A Bummer Tournament

What I Learned From a Bad Tournament

Editor's Note: Often, a rainbow follows a severe storm. Some people will see the rainbow and appreciate it, but then immediately think about how bad the storm has been. Others never may see the rainbow; they only see the storm and think about how bad it is. The old saying is true: "It's an ill wind that blows no good." The secret to a happy life is seeing and understanding the promise of the rainbow regardless of how bad the storm is, whether you have a bad event in a fishing tournament or in your life. George Cochran, two-time Bassmaster Classic Champion, of Hot Springs, Arkansas, has the ability to look beyond a bad tournament.

Cochran: The worst tournament I fished this past year was on Beaver Lake, in Arkansas, where I live. Everything went wrong in that tournament. On the first day, my engine blew up halfway through the tournament, so I lost half a day of fishing. When you lose a half a day of fishing, and you are competing against the best bass fishermen in the world, you are much like the jockey in a horse race whose thoroughbred stumbles as the horse comes out of the gate. In less than three heartbeats, you are 10 lengths behind, and the leader is rounding the first turn, at which point you go to the whip and charge with reckless abandon. You're not concerned with saving your horse for the stretch run. All your energy is spent trying to catch up.

After I had lost that half a day because of engine failure, I started trying to cover as much water as I could cover and fish as fast as possible to try to catch up on the field. I knew I was fishing too fast, but I couldn't stop myself. I hooked a 5-pounder. But instead of kneeling down on the deck, lipping the fish, taking the hook out of the fish's mouth and putting it in the live well, I tried to jerk that bass into the boat. You know what happened. The bass came off the lure, and I lost the 5-pounder I should have caught. Now I knew that I was really behind. But instead of slowing down my fishing, learning from that mistake, taking my time and fishing my water more thoroughly, I continued to speed up my fishing.

On the last day of the tournament, I realized I had to have a big bag of bass to stay in the tournament. So what do you think I did? I did the same thing that had kept me from doing well up to this point. I started fishing too fast again, didn't fish my water thoroughly, missed bass I should have caught and didn't fish some of the areas that I knew were holding bass early enough to catch the bass. But, I learned from that tournament.

I have learned that the most-important thing you can do when you are having a bad day on the water is to stop, think about what is going on, decide what you need to do, slow your fishing down and attempt to get back into the rhythm that you need to have when you catch bass. There's a natural tendency among anglers, myself included, to fish faster when we are not catching bass and fish faster when we have very little time to catch bass. However, I've learned over the years that when you are not catching bass, you need to slow down your fishing instead of speeding up.

Fish the cover more thoroughly, and try to catch each and every bass that takes your bait. Treat every bass that is big enough to measure as though he's a 10-pounder. Use your angling skills, not brute force and speed, to get the bass in the boat. Many times if I can fish the opposite way from the way my brain is telling me to fish, I can overcome a disaster and find and catch more bass. When you're having a bad day on the water, the bass are not biting, or the tournament is about to be over and you only have a few minutes to fish, slowing down instead of speeding up is the prescription you need to help you catch the bass you want.




 

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