Colorado Fishing Blogs on Fish Explorer - Panic Time?, by Troy Coburn

Sometimes I go a while in between blogs; not because there is nothing to talk about but rather because I don’t like to blog unless I have something to offer the reader. Something that they can walk away with that will hopefully help them to become a better fisherman. Sometimes it takes a bit of inspiration to get me to sit down and start typing. Well, a few days ago I had a conversation with a friend at Bass Pro Shops and it gave me the idea for this blog. So hopefully you guys can take something away from it and use it for your benefit in the future.

Well, it has been a while since my last blog and in the meantime I had fished a couple bass club tournaments which I was fortunate enough to win. This last one though, really threw me for a loop at first. It was at Chatfield and it was a night tournament; 7pm to 7am. I had a strategy going in; I was going to fish for big fish, “Fish Big” as Chad would say. I wanted to win; nothing else mattered in this one. Winning this tournament was the only hope I had to achieving the Denver Bassmasters Angler of the Year title. Second place in this case (for me) was just the number one loser. So my strategy was to concentrate on areas that (1) hold big fish and (2) not many other guys would consider fishing, namely main lake deep structure. So off we went in search of just a few, but meaningful bites.

We started on the tire reef looking for that elusive 4 lb largemouth. With no success and several other anglers beating up the tires, we went out to the middle of the lake to fish roadbeds. We had a great system to cover long stretches of the roadbed with several “big fish” presentations but to no avail. We fished our butts off and all we could catch was big walleye. Nice fish but worthless in this instance. I had become so focused in what I was doing that time had seemed to just slip away. Before I knew it, it was past 1 in the morning… and I had no fish on my card… nothing! It was time to abandon ship, time for a major change in strategy.

This is where that conversation at BPS comes into play. My friend said to me “you must have been in a panic!” Well, no, not really. What I had done up until the time where I had made the big shift in plans was in fact very productive. I had spent the previous six hours showing myself what not to do. I had eliminated all of the water in the lake deeper than 12 feet, and that does not leave much of the lake left to fish.

I once read an article in Bassmaster Magazine where the interviewer asked one of the all time great bass fishermen, Rick Clunn, if he has bad days on the water. His response was that as long as he learned something, anything about the fish or the lake, it was a good day. If he did not catch a single fish on a practice day for a tournament, he knew what not to do the next day which makes it a good day. It’s all about perspective. That simple statement has stuck with me ever since I read it and it has a calming effect when most anglers are in panic mode.

Now back to the adjustment I made at Chatfield. Fishing was tough for everyone that night. What I had done was covered all of the offshore lake structure and now knowing for certain that the bass were not there allowed me to put 100 percent of my focus on areas where my focus needed to be… shallow. Once we moved shallow, we started catching fish and ended up finding a sweet spot where the bigger fish were really stacked up. I won that tournament in about one hour of time. By contrast to my approach to the shallow water fishing, because of my hard earned knowledge that the fish were not deep, I noticed many other competitors fishing deeper when they should have been shallow. They had not spent enough time in the deeper water to have the certainty that they were in the wrong area.

So was I panicked? Not a bit. It took a while to figure it out but it’s a process that sometimes does not happen quickly. Then suddenly when you get the right combination, it can happen very quickly. My approach was through, organized and complete and there was no panicking involved; just the steady move toward success through the process of elimination.