Category Archives: Essays

Learning the Water: Kayak Tournament Fishing at Jordan Lake

10 Thursday Aug 2023

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The Question

In previous articles in this series, I described El Dorado (Shearon Harris), The North Pole (Falls Lake) and the Mississippi (Mackintosh).  Local anglers have greeted each article with either praise or with sneers. It seems that they worry that I am going to ruin a lake or that I will give away their best spots. As a result of the complaints, I started reaching out to anglers to give them assurances and obtain clearances. This only seems to have made folks even more paranoid.

Fear and paranoia create the appropriate mood for the fourth and final lake in this series. Jordan Lake is a fishery that inspires terror. There is no other way to put it.

A few examples:

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Learning the Water: Kayak Tournament Fishing at Lake Mackintosh

16 Sunday Jul 2023

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Learning the Water: Kayak Tournament Fishing at Lake Mackintosh

I. The Question

Some lakes are like old schoolmates or a friendly teacher who lives nearby; we just don’t see them all too often. When we do see them, we feel good. We leave after the visit and ask “Why don’t I visit more frequently?” Perhaps it’s because if we did, the magic might wear off. We would have too many good times and the rest of life would pale by comparison. In short, we’d become spoiled.

Or it might be that no matter how many times we go back, we always have a good time. The friendship gets stronger and every day is a new adventure. Even the quiet days are memorable. That’s being spoiled, too, in a good way.

Mackintosh, I confess, has spoiled me in the latter way. As we will see, some important kayak tournament fishing moments in North Carolina happened on the lake – and not only for me. The lake has shaped me and us like a good teacher does – it forms us, challenges us and makes learning a pleasure.

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Learning the Water: Kayak Tournament Fishing on Shearon Harris Reservoir

13 Tuesday Jun 2023

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The Question

How do we learn to fish? And more specifically, how do we learn to fish a specific body of water? The two questions address two interdependent types of education. The former is a general skill set, such as one obtains with a liberal arts degree. The latter is specialized, like a Master of Business Administration or Master of Fine Arts degree. In short, we take the general skill set and apply it to a specific body of water. We refine and fine tune, match the universal with the local, and ultimately pair the species with the phylum. By adapting our general skills to the specific lake or pond or river, the adaptation may also change our general skill set. Ideally, by way of the back and forth, we may become versatile.

The give and take between general skills and a river or lake can resemble a positive teacher-student relationship. At other times, it makes you want to send the whole class to detention.

Read more: Learning the Water: Kayak Tournament Fishing on Shearon Harris Reservoir Continue reading →

Fish Psych 101: Reflections on a Hot Streak (part II)

05 Friday May 2023

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Overview

During the darkest hour of the recent pandemic, I started reading articles about sports psychology. It began with an article on the BBC news website about a phenomenon known as “Quiet Eye” that can be identified in certain elite athletes (I’ll have more to say about that in another post). It continued from there through sports journalism, scientific studies and science writing in various media. In short, I started to wonder how current research and concepts might apply to tournament fishing.

For example, I started asking questions about what’s happening in my body when I am fishing. How is physical exhaustion related to mental fatigue? What are my eyeballs doing in relation to what my hands are doing? Can I identify patterns of movement and thought – decisions I make – from my body language and movements in the countless hours of video I record? What is my brain doing? I began noticing things, and I started writing them up.

This second installment in my “Fish Psych 101” series is actually a sequel to the first article I wrote on the topic, which I posted last season.  In that article, I began asking questions about how types of brain activity might correlate with results in tournament fishing.

Here, I dive into the recent tournaments since that streak in late 2022, waters I fished, and my general mindset. I may be starting to elaborate a theory about “confidence” that goes against the grain of what I hear in most conversations about tournament fishing. What I know for certain is that something dramatic has changed in how I approach the water, mentally speaking.

As before, I am elaborating basic concepts and attempting to summon questions more than I am deciphering answers. At times, I feel like the sorcerer’s apprentice in Goethe’s poem, and I can’t quite figure out how to control the spell. Nonetheless, I make the cast.

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Learning the Water: Kayak Tournament Fishing in Falls Lake

20 Monday Mar 2023

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I. The Question

Fishing is an acquired skill. Like just about anything else worth doing, it requires practice. Some people are quick to learn the art of casting and tying knots, others require time to learn the basics. Some simply give up. I was tempted on several occasions, before I even began fishing from a kayak, let alone tournament fishing. It’s much easier to just watch people catch fish on television.

In order to fish competitively, you also have to learn about gear, techniques for specific types of fishing and also how to fish certain waters. Add in kayaks, with their specialization and physical effort, and you can understand why some folks buy a bass boat. If you are going to leave on an expedition to the North pole, you want to be prepared, or else (see the Franklin Expedition). Kayak fishing is not easy.

I know. As I said, I learned it all the hard way. I competed in kayak tournaments for nine years without a 1st place finish. Over the past three seasons, I have had five of them on four different lakes (Jordan, Shearon Harris, Mackintosh and Falls). Each one of those lakes is a different animal, and I have been fishing them all for the past fifteen years (and in the case of Jordan, even longer). It’s time to reflect.

Having failed in many trips to the North Pole, explorers eventually found it. Falls Lake has been that sort of lake for me. The effort has been worth the risk.

For the purposes of this article, I will focus only on Falls Lake. While some of what I write here applies to the others, it is limited as to how much it translates. “How to learn the water?” has no predictable answer – it’s a question you have to ask every day you fish.

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Late Winter Bass Fishing

07 Sunday Mar 2021

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In this blog post for the Jackson Kayak website, I describe how paying attention to clues in the natural world (a deep water fish kill, buds growing on trees) led me to the winning bass bite at a tournament on a cold February day.

Late Winter Tournament Bass Fishing in the Bite FD

Back-Tracking, Double-Guessing & Sloth: Notes from a CKA Event on the Cape Fear River

27 Monday Jul 2020

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Saturday, July 25th, 2020.

The forecast says baste your hide and prepare to be cooked.

When I arrived at the launch site there was a truck parked there, but it wasn’t Drew Blair’s truck. A man emerged from the woods dragging a kayak from the direction of the river, his headlight beam a cloud of insects.

“This isn’t the start I was expecting.”

My second thought was “Where the hell is Drew?” A short conversation later, and I said goodbye to Mitch, the woodsman, who gave up on the launch site. “That’s a rough launch” he said. I offered to help Mitch because I knew, deep in my heart, that Drew was asleep and I wasn’t going to make it alone. He always sleeps in on tournament day. Sure enough, a phone call confirmed it. Thankfully, he lives nearby. Mitch declined.

I waited in the dark for a bit. There wasn’t any morning breeze. I wondered if there was any air. I hoped to hide from the bugs in the darkness, but they found me. I was standing still but I was sweating. The sun would rise in 30 minutes. Drew, half asleep, rolled up and tried to use his Jedi mind powers to make the Hobie slide off his truck.

I’ve launched from difficult locations. This one ranked near the top of the list. The weeds were waist high, ruts in the abandoned road were knee deep and the drop from the bank to the water was actually two separate drops that added up to a Cubist painting. After launching, I realized that one of my rods left one of my lures somewhere in a tree branch behind us.

This isn’t an essay about how good I am at my favorite sport. It’s about a hot river and a cold bite. It’s about the risks I take, the decisions I make and the company I keep. It’s about admitting nature doesn’t care about your fishing plan – or any plan for that matter.

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One Path among many, but only One Boat: On Joining the Jackson Fishing Team

27 Thursday Feb 2020

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Beginnings contain more than an intention. When we start on something new, we bring to it our history, or memory, and culture. We add to it our desire and we imagine what might be. We peer at the horizon and dream to see what might be there, but we can never truly know. Beginnings are that too – they are possibilities, only some of which become real.  In his wonderful book Invisible Cities, the writer Italo Calvino imagines Marco Polo entertaining Kublai Khan with stories while the two men play chess. One story begins; “The man who is traveling and does not yet know the city awaiting him along his route wonders what the palace will be like, the barracks, the mill, the theater, the bazaar.” When he arrives, he finds a different city.

Like me, Marco Polo was an Italian of Venetian descent, a wandered on water and land, a person who, when he saw the griffin carrying the tablet the Lord delivered to Saint Mark, paused. I am partial to his Travels not only for their beauty and imagination but because they were written as if each word were a stage of the journey. At times, you never quite know where they will lead. Sometimes we move in straight lines or at angles. At others we move on tracks adjacent to the ones we had planned, a step removed from some other possible reality. Sometimes the paths intersect, at others they diverge. We might even come full circle. Continue reading →

The 2010’s: A Kayak Fishing Decade in Review

30 Monday Dec 2019

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When you are young, the world is your private pond. It’s stocked with fat fish and they bite every lure you throw.  You can sit on the bank and eat chips, sleep and dream of adventures you had and will never have. You can wake up and dive in the pond or chase your friends around the banks until the wind gets winded. Youth is a fork and the world is your mussel.

Before you know it, you are tired, stressed and it’s all gone. If you are lucky, you have a job and your health. If you are really fortunate you still sneak out to fish sometimes and forget your troubles. The mussels aren’t quite as abundant and they cost more, but they still taste really good.

We are closing a historic decade in the artful sport of fishing. It will forever be known as the decade during which kayak tournament fishing went from a local hobby to national and international stature. The sport’s business side has blossomed, the media have portrayed us in a good light and there are more tournament options than one can count. There are kayaks on every lake, many with rods sticking out of them and looking like antennae farms floating on some extra-terrestrial settlement. In only a few short years, it appears a viable model for the sport has emerged: the technology has improved, state wildlife agencies have noticed us, competition formats have settled into some degree of normalcy and people are out there fishing and having fun, whether in tournaments or otherwise. Hell, even the venerated B.A.S.S. organization has adopted us. Who saw that coming?

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Following the Arrowhead: Fishing the 2019 FLW-KBF Cup on Lake Ouachita

13 Tuesday Aug 2019

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I will speak more directly for a change. No quotes from great poets or philosophers. The Professor will step aside, and the angler will be alone. I’m going to discuss teamwork, I’m going to discuss the current state of the sport of kayak bass fishing and I am going to talk, most importantly, how I changed my approach tournament fishing this season. I’m going to discuss it because I have placed in the money in 10 of the last 14 events I fished. In one of the other 4 I won 1st place in a charity tournament, and in the other 3 I was in 4th, 3rd and 13th place respectively.* It is the best winning streak of my 8 year career in kayak tournament fishing, so I obviously did something right, and I want to share it because some of it runs against logic of what we are “supposed” to do.

But first, Rick Clunn. When Rick Clunn talks, I listen. I don’t listen to imitate but to interpret what he says. Why? Because experience contains wisdom and that guy has experience spilling out of his pockets. But his experience does not apply to me directly. He fishes boats, I fish from kayaks. I will never win what he has won, or fish how or when or where he has fished. So when I listen, I ask, “How does this translate to me, if at all?”

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