Entry 32-3

When Strike King Saved the Day and Other Pertinent Fishing Information with Denny Brauer

Read the Weather for Success

Editor's Note: Fifty-three year-old Denny Brauer of Camdenton, Missouri, has competed in bass tournaments professionally for 23 years. He won the BASS Masters Classic in 1998 and has had 61 top-10 finishes. An avid angler of Strike King Lures, Brauer has helped Strike King design some of their most-popular products.

Question: Do you have another example of when changing your lure was a beneficial decision?

Brauer: Yes, in 1998 I was fishing the Potomac River once again at a different tournament. I'd found fish in a particular creek and had the creek to myself, which told me it was a lousy creek to fish. But I figured by fishing shallow, I could catch fish on the black neon Strike King Flip-N-Tube. I got by the first two days with this pattern. Then it seemed I had conditioned the bass not to bite by fishing the same body of water using the same old bait.

The next day the conditions changed. The tide was higher, making the shoreline cover more accessible to these tidal-water fish. I caught the bass by fishing around boat docks and wood cover before the high water. When the creek flooded into a lily pad field, those same bass used it as a feeding opportunity, went back into the lily pads and left the wood cover. Because the bass changed with the conditions, my tube was no longer productive. However, catching bass in those lily pads was only a matter of picking up the Strike King spinner bait, making a little adaptation because of the rising water and knowing the fish would probably move into new water as the water came back up.

I was able to get my boat back into the pads because of the water level. So I put on the big-bladed spinner bait since the water was dingy. I was using a 1/2-ounce Strike King Elite spinner bait. This was before Strike King made the big Indiana blade, so I used a No. 6 Indiana blade. I always liked the Indiana-style blades for fishing dirty water, and I think it made a difference in how I enticed the fish out of the lily pads.

I'd already fished three days of this tournament; the first two days one pattern worked; the third day I had to totally switch baits to get the bass to bite. So when I got to the water on the fourth day, Murphy's Law intervened, and the water was back down. I tried flipping the tube; then tried fishing a spinner bait around the pads that were accessible to deep water. However, neither pattern was producing bass. I was in position to win the tournament, but the two patterns that had worked the previous days were nonexistent. However, I decided to turn lemons into lemonade, picked up the jig and fished in a different area of the same body of water. I won the tournament.

A lot of times conditions force you to change your strategy. Many times common sense tells you to change, and once in a while the fact that you're not getting a bite tells you it is time to change lures.

Switching baits three times in a tournament and ending up with a win doesn't happen very often. A lot times it was the middle part of the day when I changed baits, and the fact that I was willing to change baits instead of staying with the tactics and lures that I'd used the days before enabled me to win. There is a fine line between success and failure when you are bass fishing.
 

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