Entry 203-3
James Niggemeyer’s $62,500 Payday
Editor’s Note: James Niggemeyer of Van, Texas, was one part of a four-member team in mid-May who won the first Professional Anglers’ Association (PAA) Texas/Toyota Tournament at Lake Fork. PAA decided to hold some fishing events for the members of its organization. Professional fishermen can join the PAA on several different levels, and the highest level is where an angler earns 50% of his income from professional fishing – either in tournaments, by speaking at seminars or through endorsements.
Part 3: First Day of Competition
Question: James, were you in the morning or the afternoon shift?
Niggemeyer: My partners, Terry Scroggins and Chris Daves decided to fish the morning shift, since they’d already located a good school of big bass and wanted to make sure that they could get to their spot and catch as many of those bass as they could before someone else got on that place. Between Terry and Chris, they had 10 bass – two, 5-fish limits – that weighed a total of over 30 pounds, averaging 3 pounds per bass after the first morning of competition. At our strategy meeting, when Terry came in, he said, “Before you go out this afternoon, you may want to think about going back to the place where we’ve just fished. I know you’ve got other areas where you can fish, but this spot is really hot.”
So, Frank Ippoliti and I followed Terry’s advice for the afternoon session and returned to the same water he’d been fishing that morning. In less than 10 minutes, both Frank and I had on bass. Both of us were fishing deep-diving crankbaits. We would cast them out, crank them steady back toward the boat and try to bump them off cover. 
If one of us could get a bass to bite, the other would throw back to the same spot and almost always get a bass to bite. I believe when you’re fishing a school of bass, and you catch one, the rest of the school gets excited and starts feeding. Or at least, that was how our fishing was going.
We were fishing the edge of a point, and numbers of shad were in the region. We caught some bass in the 5- to 6-pound range off this spot, and I had one 8 pounder. Frank and I had about 30 pounds as well for our afternoon session of fishing. So, our team on the first day of competition had a total of about 60 pounds of bass. But neither Frank nor I had a limit – we only had four bass each. I did catch some on the Pure Poison, besides the crankbait. My four bass weighed about 16 pounds, and Frank had four fish that weighed a total of 14.5 pounds.
As soon as we came off the water, we talked with Terry and Chris. We were all excited, because we were in the top 10-teams after the first day. 
We decided we wouldn’t change anything in our fishing strategy for the next day. With right at 60 pounds of bass for four fishermen for one day of fishing, we felt pretty good about our chances. Terry and Chris would fish first, and then Frank and I would fish the afternoon on this second day. However, that night, a really-hard storm came through the lake. We had tornado warnings coming our way, and the rain poured down. There were seven sightings of tornadoes north of Dallas, near Lake Fork, that night.
Next: Disaster Strikes
Contents:
- Part 1: How the PAA Texas/Toyota Tournament Was Set Up
- Part 2: What We Learned in Practice
- Part 3: First Day of Competition
- Part 4: Disaster Strikes
- Part 5: How Four of Us Won $250,000
