To those tourney guys/gals, what would you have done to prepare yourself more for your future self years ago? And if you could have foresight into the future today, with modern electronics possibly having chipped out every spot on the spot and weed bed, would you concentrate on things as:
Time management
Strategy
Fishing the “typical” tourney lakes more
often
Etc etc
Take money and family life schedule out of picture.
Fish as a co-angler in the NWT. Even better is if you can prefish with different anglers. The reason I say different is you don’t want to get locked in to one way of doing things.
You will see how these guys manage their time. After captaining for HS bass anglers, one thing I notice is all of the wasted time picking out lures and retying. Have 3-4 setups pretied. If you are going to be changing lures(colors), narrow it down to a few options and have them ready.
Strategy-Are you on the right fish to win? Does a spot with numbers hold big fish too? The catch photo release tournaments have no doubt changed the way I fish. I have to prepare myself to possibly only get 5 bites per day when there is another technique that would result in better numbers but smaller fish.
Time on the water helps. Keep a journal. Journal and pay attention to the weather a couple weeks before and especially a couple days before. You might journal that it was flat calm on the day you fished and you caught Walleyes in shallow water. What you might have missed was the wind blew into there for 2 days so the water was stained. If you go back and try to repeat it on a flat calm day, you will likely find clear water and no Walleyes.
I think I could go on and on but I better get back to work.
I appreciate the thoughts Fife.
Just be a sponge. Soak up all the info you can and then spend time on the water. If you are going to be a tourney guy maybe get a job working 2nd or third shift. Tourneys are all during the day usually starting around 7 am. No sense burning pre-fish time in the late afternoon after you get off work.
Might want to buy a few days with guys like Pete Harsh and Steve Fellegy and others that have seen & done it all.
Other then club tourneys it can be a expensive game. Be prepared to spend cash.
. If you are going to be a tourney guy maybe get a job working 2nd or third shift.
Too old for that Dutch. Hopefully my self employment will benefit the scheduling.
Good idea with guides. I should start booking a trip or two every year.
To a certain extent your self employment will benefit you as you can pre-fish mornings and work in the afternoons and evenings. Of course, if you get on a traveling tournament circuit that won’t help much.
I was of the newb opinion prefishing was pretty darn important. Few days of prefishing seems about right. Establishing patterns during the day to replicate actual tourney hours. Evening/night bites can lead a guy in the right direction of where they may be during daylight hours, but I’d rather not try to translate when competition is going 
Lots of time between now and then so here’s to lots of water time
From what I have heard, networking is critical to tournament fishing. Buy someone a beer, talk about what is working or not. Successful tournament anglers are dialed into a network of people who share what is working, what isn’t, what big fish are doing, best places to get bait, you name it. Share some good info and hope to get some tidbits back.
The best part of IDO is the information that is shared. You can show up at a ramp and figure out what the conditions are or you can look here and see what is working. Having a game plan before you hit the water saves you a ton of time.
i was pretty regular on walleye central and in 2012 when the FLW came to the quad cities, my PM box was filled up with guys asking questions. Every single person was very nice and a few offered up spots in the boats if I’d be willing to show them areas.
The mentality of tournament fishing and going for bigger fish is something that in my limited tournament experience I struggle with. I’m always assuming there are big fish sprinkled in with the rest of them. and sometimes i’m right sometimes not.
For me success revolves around data. every outing i make is jotted down in a huge spreadsheet database i’ve formulated. That said I also note a few of my buddies data as well. Some send me data and i keep it in a separate spreadsheet. I can wittle down a location, date, and begin to pick apart the data based on all sorts of other factors. nothing is certain but it def helps.
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