In Australian tournaments we’ve see a push to faster boats and more electronics than ever before.
But I have always said having a fast boat won’t catch you any more fish.
Now I do understand the theory behind a faster boat but in most waterways in Australia (I say Most not all) the difference between the max horsepower and a smaller boat is somewhat negligible. Let’s pick a very popular Bass fishery in Lake Glenbawn in the Hunter Valley NSW. If I left the start line with a 50hp motor at the same time that you left with a 200hp we would get to the back of the dam less than 5 minutes apart. Yes pride and ego are hard to deal with when boats overtake you but lets be realistic. 5 mins is not a game changer. In the USA some fishersmen will run 3 hours full noise. Name a dam in Australia where you can do that.? So back to my point. How can you make up some of that lost time? The answer is being organized, with the easiest way getting your tackle and boat perfect with easy access to all the things you need for the day.
I will break this down to tackle and talk about boat setups in another article. To give you an example, every time you have to dig through 20 different boxes and then untangle lures takes time. Yes, we are talking about the 1% but it all adds up. I always use what I call: a day box that has all my planned lures for the day. We know things change quickly and it doesn’t always work out. You are standing on the deck and the conditions change and you think to yourself I should be throwing something different. You sit down open your tackle and spend the next 5 mins looking for said lure. Once you found it, you then have to untangle it to get fishing again. This is where good organized tackle storage can help make up the lost 5 mins from the start line. Just imagine if this happens 3-4 times a day you are wasting a lot of time not fishing. In the early days I have even gone digging and couldn’t find what I was looking for but you guessed it I found it in the boat when I got home. Trying to capitalize on the fishing time is the key to success but that doesn’t mean add more HP.
A smart organized fisherman will out fish a fast one every time. We tend to spend hours on leaders and lines every comp but the great fisherman also pay attention to tackle storage and prep. I used to hang all my lures for the day on a drying rack but this is difficult in a small boat when you have a co-boater onboard. I strongly recommend being a co-boater for a few comps to get used to being organized. If you can master that you will have a well set up boat.
So how do you organize your tackle? A few things to consider first is your boats storage and how its configured and working out what room you have and the best way to store what you need. Most boats these days have some sort of tackle storage and they tend to lean towards that 3200 size tackle tray. With that in mind work out what fits where and don’t overload. You don’t want to move any tackle boxes to get to another if possible. I store the majority of boxes upright and labeled so I can grab them out easily. Moving or lifting boxes to see what’s in them kind of defeats the purpose. If I said to most average tournament anglers: grab me a black ¼ ounce jighead, it will take minutes not seconds. If you lose 5 jigheads in a session you have wasted up to 15mins looking for tackle.
So to finish off I would rather have a smaller more organized boat than a fast boat any day. And remember, double the hp double the cost. Imagine what you could do if you swallowed a bit of pride and could afford to spend more time on the water
AS Always
Happy FISHING
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