Entry 303-5

Kevin VanDam’s Shaky Heads $100,000

Part 5: Fish the Bass Coming to You and Not the Bass Moving Away from You

Question: Kevin, on the final day of competition at Smith Mountain Lake, the field was cut to 12 competitors. You had to compete against several of your Strike King teammates as well as nine other top bass-fishing competitors. What was your game plan for the last day?

VanDam: I hadn’t been successful bed fishing early in the morning, so I decided to go to the rocky points where I’d seen the shad spawn and the big bass cruising as soon as I left the launch site. I hoped to catch bass on swim baits or crankbaits. When I reached my first point, I saw shad spawning on the bank and caught a bass with the swim bait. Then I caught a bass on a top-water lure and one on a wacky-rigged Strike King Ocho. I was fishing a lot of lures I hadn’t tied onto a rod before the last day.

Question: You caught three bass by 8:30 am and your fourth bass before 9:00 am. How big were the bass?

VanDam: I had about 9 pounds of bass. I had two smallmouths and two largemouths and needed one more bass to get a limit. I spotted a big smallmouth on the bed and caught it on the Strike King Shaky Head jig with the dirt-colored Finesse Worm. Later, I found a nice-sized bass I’d seen the day before, which was locked-down on the bed. It weighed about 3-1/2-pounds. I was able to cull it and had about 12-1/2-pounds of bass. Once I had this better limit, I started searching for bigger bass. I saw a number of big bass coming up from deep water, but they were paired-up and not very catchable. I caught several more keepers, but I wasn’t catching any bass that would allow me to cull. Finally, late in the day, I caught a bass that would weigh about 4 pounds, which gave me about 14 pounds.

Question: What did you think going into the weigh-in? Did you think you’d caught enough bass to win?

VanDam: I knew this last day of competition was a tough day of fishing. I had a 3-1/2-pound lead going into the final day, so I knew the second-place competitor would need 18 pounds or more to take the lead. I felt I had a pretty-good chance to win, and I won the tournament by several pounds.

Question: You won $100,000 in this tournament, but more importantly, what did you learn from the Smith Mountain Lake tournament?

VanDam: Twelve of the bass I weighed-in were smallmouth bass and the other eight were largemouths. I may have been the only contestant in the tournament targeting the smallmouth bass on this lake. I targeted the smallmouth because I have a lot of experience catching smallmouth at home in Michigan. Too, I learned that because no one else fished for the smallmouths, and they had less fishing pressure, they weren’t skittish like the largemouths. I learned that the 3X Finesse Worm fished on a Strike King Shaky Head Jig could be deadly effective. I also figured out the shad spawn.

Many of the other anglers were so dedicated to catching bass on the bed that they may not have seen the shad spawn and learned how it related to the big bass moving up out of deep water. The shad spawn was inconsistent, so it was hard to use as a dominant pattern. For the first 2 hours in the morning, the shad spawn played a major role in the size and the number of bass I caught. Fishing conditions changed every day of the tournament as they often do, and I try to notice those changes and adapt my fishing to the conditions as they change on the lake.

Question: Your next tournament is on Lake Guntersville in Alabama. How do you plan to fish there?

VanDam: I don’t really want to say (grin).

Question: Well, you’ve always had good tournaments at Guntersville, haven’t you?

VanDam: Yes, I have. I’ve won at Lake Guntersville before, and this lake always has been good to me. There will be a number of different ways to catch bass at Guntersville, because you’ll have spawning and post-spawn bass to target. So, I’ll go to the lake and try to determine in what stage of the spawn is the most-catchable bass and then develop patterns around what I learn while I’m on the water.

Question: What will influence the way you fish at Guntersville?

VanDam: I’ll look at the long-term weather forecast and the current conditions of the lake when I arrive. I’ll try to pre-predict how the water and the weather conditions will change and how I’ll have to change my fishing patterns to match those conditions. If I’m fishing for spawning bass, and every day the bass are leaving from the beds to move out to a staging area, then instead of fishing for the spawners, I’ll fish for the bass moving out to stage for their summer pattern. I always try to fish a pattern that causes the bass to come to me and not move away from me. Oftentimes I try to fish the developing patterns and not the concluding patterns. Using this technique, I’ll be able to catch more bass each day of competition because the bass will be moving towards the pattern I’m fishing, instead of away.

Contents:

• Part 1: Developing a $100,000 Fishing Game Plan
• Part 2: Deciding to Not Fish Where Everyone Else Was Fishing and Going Smallmouth Instead of Largemouth
• Part 3: Catching and Cruising
• Part 4: The Shad Spawn Was the Key to Big Bass
• Part 5: Fish the Bass Coming to You and Not the Bass Moving Away from You