Entry 106-3

Road To The Classic With Denny Brauer

Just Making A Check

Editor's Note: In every season of tournament bass fishing, several events generally occur that either can make or break a fisherman's opportunity to participate in the biggest fishing tournament of the year, the Bassmasters Classic. This week, Strike King Pro Denny Brauer of Camdenton, Missouri, will share with us the times over this past year that he's been at the "make it or break it" point with the Classic, and what tactics he's used to ensure his place in this year's Bassmasters Classic.

Brauer: One of the problems with trying to define the five events that have enabled me to get to the Classic is that I'm not really good at recalling history. What happened yesterday no longer exists to me. The most-important days to me are today and tomorrow. The most-important tournament for me is the tournament I'm about to fish, not the tournaments I've already fished. But trying to look back and pull out memorable events in this past year's tournament season, I'd have to say that earning a check at Lake Guntersville in the spring of 2004 was an important time in my fishing career for the year.

I'd found a small group of bass on a 50-yard area of grass. I took these bass on a Diamond Shad by swimming the bait really fast. I caught a decent bag of fish the first and second days of the tournament. When the fish failed to bite on the third day of the tournament, I went out on the main river channel and found bass holding above some submerged grass that I caught on a Series 3 crankbait.

What made this tournament so memorable was that I was able to catch enough fish in that tournament and get a check even though I had to fish crankbait patterns, which I really don't like to fish. I felt really good just to survive that tournament. And herein may be another key to staying in the hunt for the Classic. You cannot always fish the way you want to fish - the way you like to fish - and do well in a tournament. Often you have to change tactics and use baits and strategies you don't like to fish to make a check.

Now, I know that George Cochran won the tournament at Guntersville by slow rolling and ripping the Diamond Shad up through the grass, but I couldn't get that tactic to work for me. The only way I could get a strike on a Diamond Shad was to reel the bait really, really hard and very fast. Once I caught all the fish that I thought were in that area that would bite, then I had to change tactics and lures and go to a completely-different section of the lake and fish with a completely-different pattern. Once again, recognizing that fishing conditions had changed and that I needed to change too helped me to stay in the tournament.
 

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