If you wrangled yourself a round of golf with a top PGA Tour pro, what would be the chances of you making birdie on each of the first five holes while the pro sprayed his ball all over the lot? Not good.
Or what if you found yourself with a tennis racquet in your hand, looking across the net at one of the world's top players. Think you could whistle a few service aces past him and win the set 6-0? Highly unlikely, even on that guy's worst day.
Say you got a chance to do a little sparring with a title-contending boxer. Could you pound him into a corner and land a bunch of power shots without ever tasting leather yourself? If you think so, I've got some property on Fantasy Island you might be interested in.
That's what's so great about fishing, though – on any given day, any one of us has a chance to do it better than the best of the best. Because unlike golf balls, tennis balls or boxing gloves, fish have minds of their own.
Co-angler Fred Martin of Little Rock, Ark. had a much better day 1 at the Guntersville FLW Tour than did his pro, Jay Yelas.
And while their brains may be the size of a pea, fish can use them to cause a great deal of frustration for more advanced creatures trying to get a hook in their mouth – even those who are normally very successful in that endeavor.
Fish want what they want, when they want it. And if you ain't got it, you're in big trouble on that particular day. In this game, there are days when even the best in the business ain't got it.
Jay Yelas had a day like that at the recent Guntersville FLW Tour, the first event of the 2009 season. A guy who has Angler-of-the-Year (AOY) titles on both major circuits and a Bassmaster Classic victory on his resumé couldn't have caught his breath with the aid of an aqualung on day 1. To compound matters, he had to watch as his co-angler, Fred Martin, boated one 5-pounder after another. Yelas is an upbeat guy, but he admitted that the whipping had been painful.
Not that Martin was competing against Yelas, mind you – either in reality or even in his own mind. And that's as it should be. Some of you failed to recognize the fact that the piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago about that "Beat the Elites" fiasco they're planning in Virginia was pure sarcasm (I live in California and I've never been anywhere near Smith Mountain Lake). I'm no fan of competition set up purely to boost egos – or massage damaged ones.
Martin, a cosmetologist from Little Rock, Ark., has fished the Tour as a co-angler for 6 years and competes as a pro on the Eastern FLW Series. He knows the game, he's been paired with Yelas before and they've gotten along well, and he wouldn't have minded a bit if Yelas had caught a bag as big as his – or even a little bigger.
But on that day, Martin had something the fish wanted, and Yelas didn't.
The "what" was an off-brand lipless crankbait that he'd bought in Texas while he was visiting his sister. Wherever he goes, he hits every tackle retailer he can find in search of any obscure piece of equipment that might give him an edge in his next tournament, and he's pretty sure he purchased that particular rattlebait from Academy Sports + Outdoors. It looked good on the store rack and when pulled through the fish tank he keeps at home for lure-evaluation purposes, so he added a couple of them to his arsenal for the Tour opener.
Just what was it that made that bait so much more effective that day than anything Yelas had in his well-stocked repertoire? Neither man knows. But Yelas had to borrow it to catch the lone fish he weighed in – a 5-pounder that completed a nice set of sextuplets when combined with the five Martin caught.
Yelas has been fishing professionally for more than two decades and along with all the milestones he's achieved, he's experienced just about every type of frustration possible. He wasn't too proud to admit on the weigh-in stage that he'd borrowed Martin's entire setup (rod, reel, line and lure) to prevent a zero.
It'd be nice to have a picture of the bait to show you, but alas, it belongs to Guntersville now. On day 2, Martin was paired with another pro (who shall go unnamed), and that guy also wanted to try the magic rattlebait after seeing it produce a couple more chunks for its owner. But a mighty cast resulted in a nasty backlash, followed by the popping sound that's familiar to anglers everywhere – amateur or professional.
When the lure hit the water for the last time, its physical connection to anything human had been severed.
Remember that Martin had come to Guntersville with two of those baits – whatever they were. He loaned the other to his good friend and fellow co-angler Tyrone Phillips, and it was surrendered to the lake on day 2 as well. Phillips, who zeroed on day 1, caught four fish for 14-13 that day before losing the bait.
Without his secret weapon, Martin struggled on day 3 (the final day for co-anglers) and ended up in 8th place.
He said he has more of those baits at home. But will any ever produce a day like the one at Guntersville?
Probably not, but nobody knows for sure. And that's the beauty of fishing right there.
