Entry 327-5
Strike King’s Mark Davis Is on His Road Back
Editor’s Note: Mark Davis of Mount Ida, Arkansas, one of the most-successful bass fishermen in the nation, won the BASS Angler-of-the-Year title in 1998 and 2001, as well as both Angler-of-the-Year and Bassmaster Classic titles in 1995. Davis is the only professional fisherman who’s won the Angler-of-the-Year and the Bassmaster Classic titles in the same year. Babe Ruth, one of the greatest baseball players in history, was known for his homerun record and his larger-than-life personality, making him the idol of many young baseball players. His 714-homerun-hitting record stood for many years until it was first surpassed by Hank Aaron in 1974. Most people don’t know that Ruth also held the record for strikeouts. But strikeouts didn’t overshadow his greatness. Each time Ruth had a run of bad luck on the baseball field, he’d bounce back with the power of his bat, proving that greatness comes not with a great event, but rather is defined when you come back from great defeats. Today, Davis will tell us about the homeruns and the strikeouts during the 2009 bass-fishing-tournament season.
Part 5: Time on the Water Increases Your Ability to Catch Bass
Question: How does time on the water increase your odds for catching bass?
Davis: Bass fishing has changed over the years. In the early days of bass fishing, more than 20-years ago, all the top bass fishermen were bass-fishing guides. Guides performed well in tournaments because they spent a lot of time on the water. Look at some of the pros today who started their bass-fishing careers as bass-fishing guides, like Denny Brauer of Camdenton, Missouri, Larry Nixon of Bee Branch, Arkansas, and Roland Martin of Clewiston, Florida, to name a few.
Guides can become great tournament fishermen because they have logged thousands of hours on the water and have had to produce bass for their customers under all types of water and weather conditions. When you pay money to fish, you expect the guide to put you on the bass and help you find the lures that will make the bass bite. So, the guides not only have time on the water, but they also have time on the water under pressure to perform.
When you spend time on the water, you learn all the little factors that must come together to catch bass, like: one lure has a tendency to perform this way under these conditions; this line with this lure has a tendency to produce more hook-ups; and this rod-and-reel set-up under these conditions consistently produces more bass. 
Knowing often-overlooked traits of your tackle can make a huge difference in your bass-fishing success. Also, the guides who spend a lot of time on the water learn where the bass should be holding under all different conditions every day of the year.
You may be a good fisherman, but a guide who has to perform every day puts a fine edge on the knowledge and the skill of bass fishing because of the little things they’ve learned from being on the water. Those guides catch a number of bass under a variety of conditions on a lot of different lakes. If you’re a golfer, you need to play golf 4 or 5 days a week, even if you’re not playing in a tournament. The same is true of a bass fisherman. The more you fish for bass, the more you’ll learn about fishing for bass.
Question: When we see professional fishermen at tournaments, we see them on the water at first light and coming off the water at the end of the day. We also will see them rigging and working tackle until late in the evening. But what do professional fishermen do on the days they aren’t tournament fishing?
Davis: For many years, tournaments were spread out throughout the year. You’d fish an event and then have 3 or 4 weeks off before the next event. That’s not the way it is today. We have tournaments almost continuously. Most of the time we only have time to travel from one lake to the next before the next tournament begins. 
After completing one tournament and going to the next tournament’s body of water, which is off limits until the official practice days or until the tournament starts, we make up for lack of practice time by fishing a body of water near the site where the tournament will be held.
For instance, if BASS is having a tournament on Lake Guntersville, and I get there 2 or 3 days before the official practice days, I know I can’t practice there. But I can practice on Wheeler Lake, which is below Lake Guntersville and has some structure similar to Guntersville, and expect the bass to be on the same type of pattern there. If I can find and catch bass on Wheeler Lake, I can take that knowledge and confidence and use it to try to catch bass at Guntersville during the tournament.
This way, when you go to the lake where the tournament’s being held, you have a good idea of where the bass should be on their seasonal patterns, on what type of structure they should be holding and the type of lures the bass should be biting. Too, you carry with you the confidence you’ve built by fishing successfully on the lake close to the one where you’ll be competing. In most cases, your time on the water before the tournament begins will have you on track to perform well in the tournament.
Question: Okay, Mark, the big question. Since you had a bad year this year, how will you finish next year?
Davis: If I told you, I’m afraid it will jinx me. But I will say this. Each and every year my goal is to win Angler of the Year. I haven’t won it in the last 8 years, so I feel like my time has come. But I also know that’s a big hurdle to get over. I’ve been in the groove to win Angler of the Year several times before, but then this past year, I wasn’t close at all. I know I can find that groove again. I’m confident that I will do better in tournament fishing this year than I did last year.
Contents:
- Part 1: Strikeouts and Homeruns
- Part 2: Pre-Practice to Win
- Part 3: Tackle-Up to Take More Bass
- Part 4: Believe You Can Find and Catch Bass
- Part 5: Time on the Water Increases Your Ability to Catch Bass
