(Editor's note: BassFan Charles Bowman is a structural engineer who lives in Kernersville, N.C. He regularly competes in BFL tournaments and often fishes tour-level events as a co-angler.)
Can an angler be competitive in tournament bass fishing when he is competing against folks with three times as much practice time or more?
The more bass tournaments that I fish, the more times I ask myself that question. Anglers who are sharing information among themselves, in tight-knit groups, are effectively tripling their practice info and making a self-reliant bass angler much less likely to be competitive.
When I first started tournament bass fishing some 25 years ago, club tournaments were the dominant venues of the sport. Secrecy went with tournament bass fishing.
If one could find a “honey hole," or a pattern that worked, or a bait that worked well, or any combination of those, we would hold that knowledge to ourselves as “our little secret” and try to exploit it from month to month in our local club tournaments.
Back in those days, a bass angler didn’t share his information with other competitors, and more times than not, if asked about his success, he would lie about the bait, depth, time of day or any combination thereof. Club fishing in those days taught us to be hoarders of fishing knowledge.
Times have changed.
In order for a tournament angler to be competitive in this day and age, he must share information with other competitors or he will not be regularly competitive. When I say that information must be shared, I am not talking about standing around at the pre-tournament meeting with 200 of your closest friends, discussing the three limits you’ve shaken off in practice. The sharing that I’m referring to is the comparing of notes with a trusted competitor in order to make both of you more competitive at any given tournament.
The reason we must share information is that other anglers are already sharing, and an angler who doesn’t share is an angler who will have a very difficult time being competitive, much less winning.
I am cut from the mold of practicing and competing in tournaments on my own. I had never considered sharing my information with other folks, nor was I interested in gathering information from others, until I became aware of what my competitors were doing.
A good example of how important it is to share information could be seen at the High Rock BFL tournament last summer in the North Carolina division. The temperatures had been unseasonably cool for a good portion of the late spring and early summer. With the tournament rapidly approaching in early June, and water temperatures slowly rising, most folks, including me, began to think that the fish would be moving out onto points and drops following their spawn.
What occurred was anything but a drops-and-humps tournament. The event was won by blind-dropping Texas-rigged lizards onto beds at the base of flooded button bushes in less than a foot of muddy water.
The irony of my loss in that tournament was that my father was my guaranteed co-angler and fished with the eventual boater winner. The winner stated to my father, during that day's fishing, that he had been unable to practice as much as he might have liked in the days leading up to the tournament, and that he had relied on his network of tournament friends to provide him information regarding the correct pattern.
That angler’s network included several folks who are notoriously high in the BFL series points standings year after year. These folks share information in a tightly held group, and as a result, they're very difficult for a one-man show to beat.
The advantages of sharing practice information with a trusted competitor are enormous, and the disadvantages are small. If three anglers get together, can trust each other, and share information, each angler is able to put together a tournament plan from three times the covered water, three times the practice time, three times the baits, and three times the conditions.
Compared to an angler who shares information within a trusted network, the single angler who relies upon himself is limiting his data, and ultimately limiting his knowledge in building a tournament plan.
We can compare the success of information-sharing bass fishermen to folks who participate in Indy Car racing. A car owner who owns multiple teams gathers more information during testing, practice and competition than any one-car team can on its own. The sharing of information propels all of the teams that are under that one roof.
While one car may benefit more at a certain racetrack, all in all, over the long haul, all of the teams will perform better over the course of a racing season.
The same is true in tournament bass fishing, and a great example of this is the David Wright-Jeff Coble partnership. While most of us do not have a relationship with others that would allow us to share winnings, David and Jeff’s alliance in sharing working patterns has benefited both anglers to the point of propelling them to the pinnacle of the sport at the level in which they compete.
So where does that leave a hardhead like me?
Even with all of the evidence pointing to the advantages of sharing information, I am just stubborn enough to cut my own path (and perhaps my own throat), suffering the consequences of competing against the networks, in hopes of bringing home the hardware based solely upon my ability. But for folks who wish to make a longterm living in this sport that we love, developing trusting, honest relationships with other competitors is quickly becoming less of an option and more of a necessity. If a group of anglers can trust each other, work together and encourage each other, their success is virtually guaranteed.
