Entry 251-5

Fishing Lake Amistad with Denny Brauer

Part 5: What I Learned at Lake Amistad

Question: What did you learn at Amistad that you took with you to Lake Fork and that tournament?

Brauer: I don’t really know if you learn anything from one tournament that you can use at another tournament. Every lake is an individual. Actually Lake Amistad was about 8-hours south of Lake Fork, so the bass were on the bed. They’d had a lot of rain at Lake Fork also, so the water color was different. The bites at Fork were much shallower than they were at Amistad. I don’t like to go to a tournament with many preconceived notions, like trying to fish the next lake I go to like I fished the last lake. That type of thinking will get you into trouble in a hurry.

I look at Lake Falcon this year, where I really thought I had the bass figured out before the tournament, and then I had a horrible tournament there. If I had taken what I learned at Falcon to Amistad, I probably would have had another bad tournament. The same thing’s true if you have a good tournament. You can’t think that you can take what you’ve learned at a tournament and apply that style of fishing to a new body of water. But what made me feel good about Amistad was that throughout most of my fishing career, I’ve been known as a shallow-water flipper and pitcher. And this tournament helped me to feel good about my ability to catch bass in deep water.

Question: How much did you win in this tournament, Denny?

Brauer: $13,500, and it was a heck of a lot better paycheck than I got the previous week.

Question: Denny, I know that you advocate fishing in the moment. There’s a lot of fishermen spending time researching lakes before they fish them. They like to develop game plans before they fish lakes, but we know you fish the moment. You analyze the conditions when you get to the water, and you fish whatever the lake gives you in the form of weather, water and fishing conditions. Do you see a trend on the pro circuit of more and more anglers fishing this way?

Brauer: Not at all. I fish in the moment, because this is the way that I have always fished. But I see more and more tournament fishermen trying to compile tons and tons of information and develop game plans before they get to the lake. However, I believe that if an angler wants to have longevity in his career, he has to have the courage to know that when he gets to a lake, he has the ability and the skill to evaluate the conditions, choose the lure for those conditions, and find the right water depth to fish.

Learn to fish in the moment; as the conditions change, the fisherman needs to know how to adapt to those conditions. Some fishermen, when they spend too much time preparing for a tournament, and they get to a lake and that pattern just isn’t working, they stay lost for several hours trying to figure out what to do. But I’ve developed my strategy and technique of fishing based on what I’ve learned as a guide for so many years and having to go out every day and fish changing conditions. I had to catch bass for my clients, regardless of weather and water conditions, and I learned that if I treated each day as a completely-different day of fishing than the day before, then I usually could stay on the bass. Because of fishing so many days as a guide, I learned how to quickly adjust to weather conditions and water conditions at different seasons of the year.

Now I’m not saying that I don’t struggle from time to time at tournaments, because I do. But because of what I’ve learned from guiding, I can pull from that database of how I’ve caught bass in the past under these same set of conditions, and oftentimes I’m able to find bass using that past experience. I think that what we do as professional fishermen is all about confidence. I carry my confidence around in a wheelbarrow. It’s not just my confidence and my ability to find and catch bass, but I have confidence in the lures that I’m fishing.

The corporate people at Strike King are really unusual in that any one of them could compete in national tournaments, I feel, and do well. They understand fish and fishermen, and as they develop new baits, they give these new baits to the pros to let us determine how effective the new baits are. And if you’ll notice, many of the new baits that Strike King introduces catch fire on the tournament circuits.

One of the reasons for that is Strike King listens to its pros and allows its pro fishermen to have input on the designs of new lures. Therefore, most of us are fishing baits that we have designed and have a lot of confidence in, but another thing that Strike King does that’s unusual in the fishing-tackle business is that they get new products to the consumer as fast as we prove that they’ll work to catch more bass. Some companies will hold a lure off the market for a year or two to let their pros use them until the pros have caught as many fish on them that they can catch, and then they release those lures to the public. But Strike King tries to get lures to the public as quickly as they know that they’ve got a hot lure that can help fishermen catch more fish. So I’m really excited about the lures that I fish, that I help design, and that Strike King produces.

Contents:

• Part 1: Try the Ledges and Drop-Offs
• Part 2: Let it Fall
• Part 3: Proud to Be a Jig Man
• Part 4: Fish Magic Trees with the Shadalicious
• Part 5: What I Learned at Lake Amistad