Perfect Pandemic Practice
Posted by Pete Robbins on Apr 8th 2020
All great tournament anglers are good fishermen, but not all good fishermen are great tournament anglers.
It’s a different skill set, knowing how to make the best decisions, under the pressure of time, and with large numbers of boats on the water. The guys who are consistently able to do well in competition are not always the best technical anglers, but they’re all good technicians who make great decisions.
So where does that leave us in the time of COVID-19?
In most places, the tour level anglers are still able to fish. Every one that I’ve talked to over the past few weeks has spent time on the water – trying to keep their skills sharp and kill some time. In all likelihood it’s the longest that any of them has gone without fishing a tournament in the springtime since they started to compete.
Part of keeping your skills up to snuff involves just putting steel in a few lips, but as implied above it’s also critical to fish in a tournament-like atmosphere if you want to continue to do well. At some point they will be back to competing, whether it’s next month or next year, and the ones who do well are those who have decision-making seared into their muscle memory. I’m certainly not going to tell them how to do their jobs, because if I could do it I’d be out there with them, but the ones who take time to focus on more than just techniques are the ones who will come back fresh. The ones who grunt and groan through aimless days on the water, in my estimation, are also the ones most likely to underperform.
