Entry 118-5
How to Keep a Streak Going with Mark Davis
Experience, Confidence and Courage: Keys to the Streak
Editor's Note: For four months in the spring of 2004, Mark Davis, of Mt. Ida, Arkansas, was possibly the hottest bass fisherman on the professional circuit. During that four-month period, Davis went on a winning streak and won three BASS tournaments against the best bass fishermen in the nation. For four months, Davis consistently performed at the very peak of his ability and consistently outperformed all of his competition. This week, Davis will tell us how he maintained that high level of bass-fishing performance for four months and won three major tournaments while he was in the zone. From listening to Davis explaining the streak, we’ll learn more about how to bass fish better and catch more bass every time we go fishing.
Davis: To have a batting streak where you get on base or hit a homerun in just about every game you play, there are several ingredients that have to occur. First of all, you have to know and understand the game. That knowledge comes from experience. You have seen most of these pitchers before and know their strengths and their weaknesses. You have studied films, and you know which pitches they are most likely to pitch under certain situations in the game. With that knowledge and that experience, when the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand, you feel reasonably confident that you can hit that ball and either get on base or make a home run. The same is true in bass fishing. To consistently be successful on the professional-bass-fishing circuit, you must put in a lot of time on a lot of different water under various weather and water conditions and allow the bass to teach you a lot of lessons on where they want to be, when they want to be there, and what they want to bite. Once you have that database of information programmed into your brain, and once you have the skill to maneuver a boat regardless of wind and water conditions, cast accurately no matter which lure you are using and the cover you are fishing, and you believe that you can and do know how to understand the bass, you can get on a streak. When you feel that you know where the bass should be, based on time of year, weather conditions, water conditions and past experience, then you have the courage to go to new areas on a lake that you have never seen before and apply what you know to the rods and the lures you choose and feel confident that you can catch bass. That knowledge, that confidence and that courage to try, are the three ingredients that produce the streak.
But remember, all three of those elements don’t always come together at the same time in the same place. Sometimes you may think you know what the bass are doing on the lake you are fishing when you really don’t. If all the professional bass fishermen on the pro circuits knew how to get on a winning streak and stay on a winning streak, we would all be so good that no one could ever win. I’m always confident any time I go to a tournament or go fishing that I can find and catch bass. A baseball player shouldn’t step up to the plate unless he thinks he can hit that ball out of the park. But a baseball player, just like a bass fisherman, knows that sometimes he thinks he’s tuned-in when he’s not. You can do well in bass-fishing tournaments without the proper mental attitude, but to win a bass tournament, the mental aspect of bass fishing is huge. You can consistently be in the money if you maintain a really-good mental attitude. If you’re not mentally prepared, you’ll often make a poor decision that may cost you a tournament.
For instance, the last event I won in Prattville, Alabama, on the Alabama River, was a different kind of tournament. This was a shootout-type tournament where anglers rotated through several specific areas of the lake, and everyone fished the same water. When the rotation was drawn, I felt that I had a really bad spot in the rotation. I was the next to the last fisherman to get to fish what I believed to be the best area of the lake, which meant all of the other anglers had fished through that area before I got to it. I knew I would have to fish all day long through water that held very few if any bass before I got to fish the really-good water, and when I got to the really good water, I knew that every fisherman in the tournament had already fished that water ahead of me, and more than likely, had caught all the bass that wanted to bite. I had a really-negative attitude, not only about my chances for winning the tournament, but for just catching fish. Let’s face it, when you have to fish behind some of the best bass fishermen in the world, and you know they’ve fished over every piece of cover that looks like it might hold a bass, then it’s real easy to get discouraged.
Once I recognized that I was defeating myself before I ever competed, I changed my outlook. There were six different places we all fished. On the first day of the tournament, I didn’t catch a single bass from four of those six areas. I caught most of my fish from that one good region that everyone else in the tournament had fished ahead of me. We were fishing an hour and 20 minutes in each one of these areas. After I had worked four dead-water spots and didn’t get a bite, I was beginning to believe I had no chance of catching any decent fish. But rather than accept that mental defeat, I decided to attack each of those bad areas with a completely different strategy than I fished on the first day. I tried to find a pattern that would make bass bite at those sites that no one else had considered using. Having the ability to make that kind of mental decision and to change my attitude from totally negative to totally positive was a huge factor in being able to win a bass tournament. Even though I believed that I had fished the very best I could fish on the first day of the tournament, when I didn’t catch any bass in those first four spots, I decided to abandon all the tactics I had used that first day and try new strategies I had never crossed my mind on the first day.
On the second day, I tried to look for the things that I had overlooked on the first day, and I started seeing little bitty clumps of grass that were so shallow I hadn’t fished them. They were so shallow that I was sure no one else had fished them either. They just didn’t look like they would hold a bass. So, I started pitching a 3/8-ounce, black-and-blue Strike King Premiere Elite Jig with a Denny Brauer Chunk on the back of it, past those little patches of grass and then swimming that jig just under the surface of the water, right by that grass. I caught bass in those four spots where no one else had. So by the time I got to the really-good spot, I already had a limit of bass. When I applied that same technique of fishing those really-shallow small patches of grass with the swimming-jig tactic, I caught bass big enough to cull some of the bass I already had in my livewell. The water I fished was only about a foot deep. This new tactic not only allowed me to win that tournament, but I picked up a piece of information that I’ll use in other tournaments. I really don’t like to fish shallow water, so I had to overcome that problem before I successfully catch any bass. I had to decide that the bass weren’t holding in deep water, and if I was going to catch fish, I was going to have to fish shallow.
In that tournament I learned that by changing my mindset and being willing to do the things I didn’t like to do, I could catch the bass I wanted to catch. For me, that was a huge lesson to learn. I’m convinced that if I had continued on with my defeated mindset, and told myself, “Well you didn’t catch any bass in those four bad places yesterday and you probably won’t catch any in those four bad spots today, and since everyone else has fished ahead of you, by the time you get to the good spot all the good bass will already have been caught,” then I wouldn’t have done as well as I did in the tournament. But when I decided that tomorrow was a new day, and I would try all new tactics and look for the things I had overlooked on the first day, I completely turned that tournament around and went from a loser to a winner.
So, yes, you have to have the skill, the knowledge, the experience and the courage to try to get a streak going and keep a streak going. But, if you don’t have the mentality to be able to change your own attitude from negative to positive, I don’t believe you can consistently win bass tournaments. I believe those are the elements that produced three major tournament wins for me in four months. Can I do it again next year? I really don’t know. But I know it’s been great while it’s lasted.
