Surefire Ways to Lose a Redfish Tournament: Part 1

I haven’t been fishing redfish tournaments very seriously for a couple of years now. Although I love fishing them, I just haven’t had time to participate. But the other day, a few of my friends had just gotten back from a big Redfish Cup event and the topic of conversation was not how to win a tournament, but how to lose one. If you can avoid doing some of these things, you’re bound to increase your odds of finishing in the money.

Here are some of the surefire ways to lose a redfish tournament.

Count on one school of fish or one fishing spot.

When prefishing, it’s easy to get fixated on one group of fish or one spot that has been producing. Don’t get me wrong, spending a day at one spot or with one school of fish isn’t necessarily a bad idea. This can help you be certain the fish are the right size, learn what lures they’ll eat best and figure out where the fish go when the tides and conditions change. However, once you feel like you’ve got a good bead on how the fish are moving around, behaving and what they are eating, move on and find more fish. I’ll share my personal painful learning experience as to why.

Several years ago, I was preparing for an FLW Redfish tournament in Mosquito Lagoon. I planned on prefishing for 7 days. Turns out that I didn’t really do that much fishing at all. The second spot I checked, on the first day of prefishing, was loaded with about 200 perfect redfish. The first cast produced a 26.5″ 7.5lb red. They all looked the same size so I just sat there and watched them for the rest of the afternoon to see where they would go. They stayed put. The next day, I brought my tournament partner out with me to let him take a look at them. As we quietly trolled up to the spot, I reached back to sling a jig in the direction of the fish and said with a grin, “Watch this.” I twitched the jig twice and hooked up. A nice 26.5″ 7.5lb redfish came boat-side and I said to my partner, “They’re all like this and they’re staying right here”.

We decided that we didn’t want anyone else stumbling onto these fish so our plan was to camp out on them until the tournament started later in the week. We figured that if we just babysat the fish that nobody would come close enough to see what we were on. We knew that if other anglers saw us sitting there for a few days that they would know that we were on something but we were betting that nobody would go there on day one of the tournament unless they had actually seen the fish for themselves.

The day before the tournament, we were sitting there reading books while babysitting our fish just like the two previous days,  a boat ran by us within 100 yards and it seemed to spook the fish. These fish hadn’t moved in 7 days and now I am watching them get up and cross the flat. I could see them pushing a wake as they vanished into the horizon. I told my partner that this worried me and he said, “They’ll be back. They just got spooked by that boat.” Well, we sat there for another 2 hours and they did not come back. It started to rain and I decided that we better head in to prepare for the captain’s meeting.

All the way back to the hotel I worried that it was the rain that moved these fish and not the boat that ran close by us. I had a sick feeling in my stomach about it. The next morning my worst fears were realized. It took about 45 minutes to get to the spot that morning just to find out that the fish I had counted on so much had vanished. Who knows why those fish moved? Was it the rain the day before? Was it pressure from us sitting there for 7 days? It didn’t matter what the reason was. That wasn’t important. What was important was that we had spent the whole week sitting right there and we didn’t didn’t know where any other fish were.  We put all our eggs in one basket and the basket was now empty. It was a sickening feeling and an expensive lesson to learn.

We ended up catching a few small fish during the tournament but we were so sick about the whole ordeal that we didn’t even bother to weigh them in. If you want a good game plan for losing a redfish tournament, then count on one spot to produce or one school of fish to be where you left them and you won’t often be disappointed.

Put your trust in somebody else.

Information you get from others at a tournament may more may not be given with ill intentions. Either way, putting your trust in information you get from others can be a costly mistake. Even if the information your are given, by someone else is given to you with the best of intentions, it’s just not good practice to bet your tournament on it. The person giving you this info doesn’t know the capabilities of your boat, they may not be good at explaining what they are trying to tell you and you just never know how good the info is because it’s second hand info.

I won’t mention names in this story because I worry that my friend might be embarrassed or that the people who gave the good intentioned info to him might think I’m speaking ill of them. But, a good friend of mine was having a hard time finding quality fish while prefishing for a big event this year. He had befriended another team during the year and he was telling them about his misfortune. Well, this good intentioned team decided that they could share the fish they were on and that my friend could just follow them to the spot. My friend mentioned that the water would be low tournament morning and asked if they thought he would be able to get his boat into the spot. The good intentioned team assured him that it would be shallow but there shouldn’t be any problem getting there. So, tournament morning comes up and off they go. It would be an hour’s ride to the spot and my friend was right on the tail of his benefactors. They got within sight of the bayou that they would be fishing when his boat bottomed out in the mud. They sat there for 4 hours waiting on the tide to come in. Leaving them with a very small amount of time to fish before they had to be back at the dock for weigh-in.

I have no doubt that the anglers who shared this info with my friend did so with good intentions, but they just didn’t really know the capabilities of my friends boat and that it couldn’t run in 4 inches of water like their tunnel hulled flat bottom boat could. Putting your faith in others and their information can cost you. My buddy may have not won that tournament anyway. He wasn’t on good fish anywhere else. But, I can tell you he would have had a better shot fishing just about anywhere than he had stuck in the mud for 4 hours on day one of that tournament.

Part Two >