Entry 100-5

George Cochran - My Five Most Miserable Tournaments

Partner-Luck: Me-No Luck

Editor's Note: Most of us believe that professional fishermen live the stuff of dreams. They fish for a living, teach seminars, work with sponsors and have a great time. But the side of professional bass fishing that we rarely ever see is the bad tournaments-miserable tournaments-the tournaments they want to forget. Just like you, professional fishermen have bad days also. This week, George Cochran, a 2004 inductee into the Professional Bass Fishing Hall of Fame will share some of his memories of his worst tournaments.

Cochran: I was fishing a tournament and doing pretty well. I was in tenth place on the last day of the tournament and really felt that I could have a chance to win. I was catching my bass with a Strike King spinner bait. On the last day of the tournament, I went to the spot where I'd been catching my bass, and I started fishing my spinner bait. My partner in the back of the boat was fishing a crankbait. He caught two keeper bass on that crankbait fishing behind me. So, I immediately changed to a crankbait, and to keep from competing with me, my partner started fishing a top-water lure.

Well, he took two more keeper bass on the top-water bait, and I didn't even get a strike on the crankbait. So, I changed to a top-water bait, and my partner changed to a plastic worm. My partner was really feeling bad about catching more bass than I was, and he'd tried to keep from fishing the lures that were producing to let me fish those lures and catch bass. So, I start fishing the top-water lure and he starts catching bass on the plastic worm.

This changing-bait tactics went on all day long. When my partner would catch one or two bass using one type lure, I would put that lure on my rod and reel, and my partner would fish something entirely different. But for some reason, no matter what my partner fished, he caught bass. Although I would fish the same lures my partner was fishing I could not catch a bass. So, to make along story short, the last day of this tournament I never caught a keeper bass, and my partner weighed in the heaviest stringer for a one-day catch in the entire tournament. If I had caught the fish that my partner caught, I would have won the tournament.

You can't imagine how frustrated, aggravated and miserable I felt when I went to the scales with no fish and my amateur angler weighed in the heaviest stringer of bass caught in the tournament. Everything I did that day was wrong, and everything my partner did was right. To even make the day more frustrating, this amateur threw a plastic worm out and got a big backlash in his reel. I watched, and it took him five minutes by the clock to dig that backlash out of his reel. When he finally got the entire backlash out of his reel and started reeling all the slack line, he had a 5-pound largemouth on the end of his line, and I landed the fish for him. I couldn't get mad at my partner. He was doing everything he possibly could to allow me to catch fish and himself to keep from catching fish. I guess that was part of the reason for my frustration. There was no one to get mad at and nothing to be mad about. My partner was just lucky, and I couldn't seem to do anything right.




 

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