RIP Specialist: part two
In the
last article I outlined a few ways to improve diversity and start becoming a
more well-rounded angler. In this piece, I’ll concentrate on why I feel you
should do this and what changes happened to end the era of the specialist.
A few
things started to happen around 2010 or 2011 that changed the way our sport is
played. Technology began taking giant leaps, information became much more
accessible, and the popularity of our sport exploded. All this created pressure.
Pressure that changed the way bass behave and the way that competitive events
could be fished. Pressure is the least understood and most confusing adverse
condition that a tournament angler can face. When dealing with drastic weather
changes, rapidly rising or falling water, or rapid changes in clarity,
adjustments must be made, but which adjustments to make can be pretty straight
forward. When you’re fishing an event on a body of water that has been pummeled
by tournaments and practice for a week before the first cast it is harder to
know what changes will get you bit. The more diverse your arsenal is and the
more confidence you have in every technique in your boat, the better suited
you’ll be to deal with pressure.
I would
love to give you an example from the kayak world on how an angler dealt with
pressure and rose above the crowd, but for the most part a kayak anglers
solution to dealing with pressure is to get far – often very far - away from
it. I feel that upcoming rule changes will hinder this strategy in the near
future, though. Also, the coverage of major national kayak events isn’t nearly
on the level of the boat scene. For now we don’t have objective experienced
analyst who know the whole picture. We rely on anglers who film their events
for insight into how things are playing out; this doesn’t give us the whole
picture so I’ll give an example from the Bassmaster elite series event from the
Harris Chain (2022).
A large
portion of the field was crowded into a grass flat that was at most a square
mile area. After three days of competition the easy ones had been caught and
when day four rolled around the weights from that area began to wane. There was
one angler who rose above the pack on day four. He made a subtle tweak to the
terminal tackle he was using to fish a swimming worm and caught the biggest bag
of the day from an area that had been hammered. Sometimes the adjustment is
tackle, sometimes it’s presentation, sometimes it’s speed. The point is to
experiment until it clicks. If you are too headstrong to change you will get
left behind. The only way to make these changes is to be comfortable with
whatever is in your hand.
Aside
from pressure we are understanding a lot more about bass behavior. There aren’t
as many secrets as there used to be. The vintage angler may have spent his
entire day burning a spinnerbait down the bank because they assumed that was
the best way to get the job done. He wasn’t competing against a field of
anglers who would target a shad spawn on seawalls for the first two hours, then
skip docks until 11:30, then transition to running offshore waypoints. Knowing
all those could be viable options during the course of a tournament day and
understanding the timing of each Is just the reality for modern competitive
anglers.
All
this isn’t griping about where the sport is headed. It’s exciting to learn new
things and push the limits of your comfort zone. The more you do this the more
you will look back and realize your comfort zone starts to feel a lot like a
rut once you have hung out in it for a while. If you enjoy the process, enjoy
learning, stay curious, and push the boundaries of what your fishery and this
sport have to offer it will pay dividends. Understand and respect your roots,
then push past them.
The third and final part of this series will cover how we
getting caught up in the latest and greatest is just another pitfall that can
narrow or thinking and keep us from being as diverse as possible. Stay Tuned!
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