Seat Time

My cousin’s son retired from competitive chess before the age of 8. He was bored by the local competition and needed to move on to other endeavors. A couple of years later, we were all at a restaurant and he grabbed the wine list.

“Dad, look what they have,” he yelled out, a little too loud. “This one got a 92 from Robert Parker’s wine advocate.”

He wasn’t a drinker, and probably hadn’t even tasted the stuff, but he knew all about it. He might as well have been describing the Kama Sutra. You can map out the dance moves, but it doesn’t make you Fred Astaire.

I’ve always thought that one of the best things about tournament fishing is the impartiality of the scale. At the end of the day, you bring your fish to the weighmaster, and they weigh what they weigh. No style points, no bonuses for the pretty ones. Increasingly, however, I’m starting to believe that the absolute best thing about the sport is the importance of seat time. You can read about something all you want, YouTube it to death, theorize until you’re blue in the face, but until you actually get out on the water it’s exactly that – theoretical.

To me, the ultimate example of that is driving a bass boat in rough water. You can listen to people more experienced than you, take lessons from the passenger seat, but until you’re actually holding the wheel instead of the “oh crap handle” you can’t possibly know how to climb ‘em without stuffing ‘em. Believe me – I left a windshield in “The Broads” on Lake Winnipesaukee in 1997 and battered that poor little Ranger with a half million stress cracks in just a few years. The waves don’t always break the way that the textbook and the Discovery Channel tell you that they will.

Over the past year, I’ve really gotten into the big bait scene – the on-the-water results may not show it, but the intent is there. I’ve read what I could, spent more than I should have, and tried to turn theory into practice. Then last Friday I went out with local swimbait-only angler Daniel Jones. Even if I hadn’t seen a near 7-pound come up out of the end of a laydown to crush his Phoney Frog glider, I still would’ve left the water that day with a better understanding of everything I’d been missing, and quite a few things that never would have become evident.

I’ve been privy to all sorts of lessons like that along the way – spinnerbaiting with KVD, cranking with Keith Combs, dropshotting with AMart – but many of the best have come from local or lesser-known anglers. There’s a wealth of knowledge out there, much of It accessible to anyone who wants to ask. There may come a day when Chat GPT is the path to the Classic, but for now it’s still a matter of time on the water. Strike that – quality time on the water.