How much time do you spend graphing during a one-day tournament?

[plawren53202]

This past year I started fishing tournaments (local club tournaments). It has been a blast, but lots of learning to do as well. The biggest thing to me has been learning the art of a gameplan or strategy for a tournament day and how that has to add on top of the pure "fishing" decisions like what to throw, what pattern to fish. I also, when I have a day or 4-5 hours of fishing time alone, try to practice under a mock tournament scenario (e.g., plan a route of spots to try ahead of time, try to fish at tournament speed as much as possible, and dealing with adjusting on the fly).

 

This past weekend that led me to the question about how much time to spend graphing. I'd love to be fishing MLF or Bassmaster Elites and have 2 1/2 days of practice. Taking ample time to graph different areas would be much easier. But this past weekend for instance, I had a half day that I was doing one of my mock tournament runs. I hadn't been bass fishing at this lake in a few weeks and I knew the changeover from fall (back in the creeks gorging on shad) to winter (going back out deep again) was just starting. Ideally I'd love to spend a day graphing some deep spots to get an idea of whether they're there.

 

But if this was a typical local club format, where I had 8 hours day of game, and no practice beforehand, how do you manage that? I'd hate to be fishing shallow all day, and find out later the fish were well on their way back out deep. But at the same time, with only just the one day, the thought of heading out deep to graph for any significant amount of time would have made me nervous as well. Yet I hear things like Jonny at Fish the Moment talking about how he graphs for 4 hours before finally landing on them deep. I guess I don't have enough confidence in my deep graphing skills to bet the house on that.

 

Even in my little half day mock run this weekend, my initial guess at a pattern was off. Three weeks ago I was catching them shallow on rocky banks relatively close to deep water, and they were hitting a spinnerbait. This weekend I didn't get a bite on that pattern. Thankfully I didn't have to adjust too much, as I finally found them (late) just a little deeper on main lake points, hitting a jerkbait. 

 

As I think through all of this, it makes me wonder if the reason that it seems like most local club tournament guys I have fished with or met are bank beaters. They just don't have spare practice time to look elsewhere, and if you're going to pick one pattern to gamble on, flipping laydowns or grass might have better odds than graphing deep with no time other than "game time" to be out there looking around.

 

Thanks in advance for any thoughts from you experienced tournament guys on this. This strategy part has been by far the most interesting part of the tournament experience for me.

[Logan S]

The big question is what are you looking for or hoping to find?  Because outside of some specific scenarios like schooled, actively feeding fish...Most of the time scanning is done looking for cover/structure, presence of baitfish, or just get general lay of the land in the areas you're fishing....IE, most of the time it's not actually a situation where if you find what you're looking for you're going to immediately catch a winning stringer.  

 

I generally don't do much scanning on an actual tournament day...Here and there sure, but really only to check or confirm something I already know about, like scanning across a point to see if it has what I'm looking for (bait or fish or other activity) for a single pass before dropping the trolling motor on it. It's very rare that I go out and scan/scout for new stuff on a tournament day itself.  Most scanning can be done anytime beforehand...Whether its immediately before the event or not.  I spend most of the winter scouting and scanning at places that I'll fish tournaments on the next season.  Structure, topography, and most cover (besides grass) doesn't change...So you can find it in December and put it to work in May .  

 

Also, club level stuff is almost always just a single day (occasionally 2)...So you can't really compare that to practice for a 4 day pro level event, it's almost apples vs oranges.   You need a lot of stuff to support 4 days of tournament fishing, so when you see the pros talking about scanning for so long in practice it's because they need at least 4x as much stuff.  They need to account for the 4 days plus factoring in other pros finding the same stuff they did.  Most of the time they aren't locals either, so they need familiarize themselves with the place as well.  

 

One day events can usually be supported on a single 'milk run', so the strategy for that relies more on your experience on the specific lake/river and what your backlog of successful areas/patterns is like.  Even with zero practice you can put together successful single day tournaments if you have enough experience/history on that body of water.  If you are fishing mostly local/club one day tournaments, a very good strategy is to focus on building up your own milk run for each place you fish...Whether that's deep, shallow, or a mix is up to your personal style and the types of waters you fish.  Scanning is a big part of all that, but not really on the tournament day itself .  

[plawren53202]

Logan S, thank you very much for the thoughtful response. Super helpful.

[TnRiver46]

I have nothing to offer anywhere near as helpful as Logan , but After reading your question I was reminded of a video I saw. It was a couple pros sitting around after practice and somebody was talking about how much they graphed during practice. One of the guys spoke up and said “you might want to at least flip a few boat docks or something.” I’m not big into tournaments but it’s easy to get caught up scanning around even for me. But if I see something good on there I’m fishing it! Then you can get caught up fishing all over different spots that look good on the graph but simply don’t produce. Sometimes just relying on instincts and ability will put more fish in the boat. Lots of tourneys are won with electronics but there’s probably just as many won by people fishing to their strengths and catching 5 nice bass