Bass fishermen are also getting the chance to start earlier.
You may have seen the article in the Griffin Daily News last Friday about Cody Stahl and Tate Van Egmond, CrossPointe Christian Academy students that live here. They have a high school fishing team and the two of them placed 10th in the Bass National High School Fishing Championship on Kentucky Lake in July. Cody plans on being a professional fisherman and is starting out right.
Both the FLW and BASS now have high school and college organizations. Some colleges offer bass fishing scholarships now. I have been doing articles with some of those high school and college fishermen the past few years. This year BASS named a National High School All American Bass team. Two of them are from Alabama and one from South Carolina and I have done articles with all three. They all are very good fishermen, especially for their age. The current issue of GON has the article with Lori Ann Foshee – the only female member of the team, and on the cover is a picture I took of her holding up two five-pound bass she caught t Seminole on our trip.
Dawson Lenz grew up in Peachtree City and was a good high school fisherman. He chose to go to North Alabama College since it had a fishing team, was right on a great Tennessee River chain of lakes, and they gave him a full scholarship. His team won the College National Bass Championship twice. He graduated this year and is starting to fish the pro trails and I expect him to do well.
I have gotten to spend some time in a boat with some of the top pro fishermen in both trails doing articles. To give you an idea of the kind of money they can make:
Kevin Van Dam – $5,690,476.33 – 370,950 6 million
Casey Ashley – $1,173,262.00 – 230,999 2 million
Rick Clunn – $2,247,191.53 – 882,477 4.5 million
Boyd Duckett – $1,542,753.47 – 27,087 2 million
Micah Frazier – $34,194.00 – 225,728 300,000
Kelly Jaye – $89,051.60 – 80,187 150,000
Steven Kennedy – $1,262,763.00 – 786,277 2 million
Randall Tharp – $335,220.00 – 141,323,144 2 million
Greg Vinson – $512,957.06 – 123,930 650,000
I often wonder, and many fishermen ask me, what is the difference between a club fisherman like me and the top pros, and I have asked them that question. How can pro bass fishermen catch more bass than me? Part of it is time on the water, learning how to find and catch bass under varying conditions. Part of it is the mechanics. I can get a bait under a dock a couple of feet most of the time. Those guys can skip a bait from the front of the dock all the way to the back with little splashing almost every cast. And, unlike me, they hardly ever hit the dock!
I think there is something else, a sixth sense they have about catching bass. I compare it to baseball and playing the piano. Anybody can learn to play both, and practice constantly to become very good. But few will ever play in the major leagues or play a concert at Carnegie Hall. The people that make it to the very top of any profession have something special that gives them an edge.
At times I have a flash of that insight or sixth sense. Before a tournament I will just know in my mind if I go to a certain place and do specific things I will catch fish, and sometimes it works out. It doesn’t happen much to me. But those pros admit they often have that insight. It is so common that one pro is known for saying “if you think it, do it.’ He and the others are listening to that insight.
One of the first top pros I fished with was Boyd Duckett. He had won the Classic the year before we went and was at the top of his game. Even those pros, like all others, have ups and downs. I went with Boyd on his home lake, Demopolis in Alabama, and we were out from daylight to dark. He worked as hard as anyone I have ever been out with showing me his techniques and trying to help me catch fish. At the end of the day he had landed 33 bass – and I had landed 4! We were using the same baits, fishing the same places, but he still beat me eight to one!
A similar experience happened to me on Eufaula. We had a club tournament the same weekend a BASSmasters tournament was going on. That morning I caught a 3.5 pound bass the first place I stopped. As I went to the next place I wanted to fish I saw a bunch of boats – I counted 17 when they stopped – running up the lake behind another boat.
All those boats were following Denny Brauer – one of the top pros at that time. During the day I saw him six times – he was going into places as I was leaving, fishing the same cover and structure I had just fished. I found out later he was fishing a jig and pig on the edge of the grass in them, exactly what I was doing.
At the end of the day he had five bass weighing over 20 pounds. I had my one 3.5 pounder – I never caught another fish that day!
That happens often.