Entry 143-4
Kevin VanDam's $106,000 Weekend
From Hero to Zero
Editor's Note: Kevin VanDam of Kalamazoo, Michigan, one of the strongest names on the professional bass-fishing circuits for many years, has won a Classic and the title of the Angler of the Year for Bassmasters. He’s long been one of Strike King’s top national pros. In the early summer, VanDam once again proved why he’s one of the best of the best by winning one of the Top 50 Elite BASS Tournaments and going home with $106,000. The tournament was held on Lake Louisville, just outside of Dallas, Texas. To learn what making $106,000 in a week is like, we’ve asked VanDam to tell us the story of the win and the new lake record he set.
VanDam: With the Top 50 format on the third day of the tournament, 12 anglers fished for all the money. Six different areas were selected, and two tournament fishermen were put in each area. Then we rotated holes. None of the places we were going to fish were anything at all like the areas where I’d caught the bass the two previous days. The wind was blowing, the water was stained, there was a little bit of timber in the water, and the course was set up in one of the main feeding rivers that set up the lake. So, nothing I’d learned from the two previous days would help me on this third day of the tournament.
In this kind of situation, I decided to go to my confidence bait, which was a 3/8-ounce Strike King Premiere Elite bleeding-bait series, with a chartreuse-and-white skirt with a red hook. I took an Indiana blade and put it on the back of the spinner bait to help slow down the retrieve and still give off a lot of flash. I was throwing the spinner bait around very-shallow wood, some of it less than a foot deep, and I was using a slow, slow, slow retrieve. Even though I wasn’t bumping the bottom, I was really letting the blade thump, and I was keeping the spinner bait as tight to the cover as I could. Now unlike my shaky head bite, the spinner bait bite was hard and violent. The fish in the shallow water would really blow up on that spinner bait.
My problem was that I was catching a lot of short fish that just weren’t big enough to measure. I did catch six keepers and felt lucky to have them. We rotated holes every hour, and I just stayed with my spinner bait and fished in shallow water. Now, I did use other lures as we rotated through the areas because some waters we fished just weren’t spinner bait places. All the fish that I kept came from using the spinner bait. I had 8 1/2-pounds at the weigh-in and was in third place. Going into the final day, I was 4-1/2-pounds down. I really didn’t think my chances were good going into the last day. I knew I’d have to catch a really big bass or a really big limit to even have a chance to win.
The night before the last day of the tournament, I tried to get prepared. I rigged up some extra spinner baits so that if I hung up I could go ahead and break off and not move into that really-shallow water and mess up the area I was trying to fish. I decided I’d spend all my time in what I’d determined to be the very best parts of each one of those six places we had to fish. I had decided to flip and fish the spinner bait in all the spots where I’d caught bass before, hoping to catch a big stringer.
Next: I Didn't Really Do That
Contents:
- Part 1: Game Plan of a Champion
- Part 2: A Day to Remember Forever
- Part 3: My Luck Still Held
- Part 4: From Hero to Zero
- Part 5: I Didn't Really Do That
