Entry 149-4
How Kevin VanDam Won the 2005 Bassmasters Classic
VanDam’s Second Classic Day
Editor’s Note: Kevin VanDam of Kalamazoo, Michigan, won more than $250,000 this year at the Bassmasters Classic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Three Rivers area. This Classic has become known as the “Minnow Classic,” because the participants caught so many small bass and was won by the lightest weights of fish in the history of the Classics. VanDam won the tournament by a mere 6 ounces. According to VanDam, “This was the most mentally-challenging tournament I’ve ever fished.” This week you’ll see VanDam’s strategy, his frustration, his disappointment and his eventual triumph.
Question: Kevin, how did you fish on the second day of competition?
VanDam: I fished pretty much the same way I did on the first day. But, I decided to
concentrate all my fishing on where I believed the best areas to catch bass were located. Instead of fishing everything, I decided to fish the points of the bridge pilings that faced into the current. I didn’t fish every little point, every little bank or the entire bridge pilings. Instead, I decided to concentrate all my energy to fish in the up-current side of the bridge pilings.
The second day turned out to be much tougher for me than the first day, mainly because there were a lot of other competitors fishing in the same area where I was fishing and using the same pattern. This made it really hard to get on a good spot because there was usually another boat there, making it a really tough day since we were all pounding the same water. In fact, most of us were fishing behind each other. Every time
one of the leaders would leave one of the bridge pilings, another of the nation’s top fishermen would move to that same piling and start fishing.
I had five or six keeper bites, but only landed three of them. Without question, the second day of the tournament was my most-frustrating and toughest day. I was still fishing a number of various baits. Since there were so many other competitors fishing different lures, I had to continue to try different baits to see if I could make the smallmouth bite. I had to thoroughly work each region I fished and fish every section of the water column, from the bottom all the way up to the top. To do that, I had to fish a wide variety of lures, and I actually caught bass on each one of those lures.
I didn’t want to miss any bass that might be on the bottom feeding or any bass that might be on the top attacking shad. I learned that in the afternoon the fishing seemed to get better than in the mornings. The brighter the sun became, the tighter the smallmouth would hold to the bridge pilings, the rocks, the sea walls or the barge sides. I was fishing beside barges and anywhere else I could fish, to try and scratch out a bite.
Question: With that much competition in the area you were fishing, how did you make a decision to stay on a spot, or to abandon that spot and move to another spot?
VanDam: When I fish for smallmouth, I know I’m going to catch them in the first few minutes I fish, or else I’m not going to catch them. Therefore, after I made 20 consecutive casts to the up-current points of the bridges, I’d usually catch a fish if I was going to catch one within those first casts. I learned that if I didn’t catch a bass within the first 10 minutes I fished, I probably wasn’t going to catch a bass. I knew if I spent 30 minutes on a spot, I was more than likely wasting 20 of those minutes.
The majority of the bass I caught, were caught my first cast, or within the first 20 casts I made. I learned that the most-effective way for me to fish was by hitting a bridge piling, making 20 casts and then leaving that bridge piling. I also learned that once I caught one or two bass off a bridge piling, no matter how long I stayed and fished that piling, I wouldn’t catch any more bass there. I tried several times to spend more than 20 casts at a bridge piling, and I learned that it just didn’t pay off.
Question: Kevin, why were the bass on the up-current side of the bridge piling instead of the down-current side?
VanDam: The current was really slow. I would say it was moving about 1 mile per hour. The current would carry the shad down the river, and the smallmouth would sit on the up-current side of those bridge pilings where the bridge pilings broke the current and wait for these balls of shad to come drifting by. Then they could pick off the number of shad they wanted to feed on. So by the second day I’d learned a lot, but once again I was really frustrated because I only caught three of the seven keeper bass I should have caught. I was also frustrated because all the leaders in the tournament were fishing the same area and the same bridge pilings.
