![]() ![]() “A lot of areas I found were on the bank, but you had to work the bait, whether a crankbait or ChatterBait or Hard Head, by throwing it off the bank a little bit,” he explains. Without a depth finder, Cox had to expand his game the old-fashioned way by simply fishing out away from the bank. Then I went back the third day, and they weren’t in there anymore.” If they weren’t over 3 pounds I’d pull it away from them. It got right because the bluegills showed up. I’d pull in and spend 20 minutes, and if it wasn’t right I’d leave. “I was constantly hitting them over and over. “There were some pads by the ramp where I had no bites in practice or the first day of the tournament,” Cox recalls. They were places where he’d caught them in the past or where he had a very strong inkling that he could catch them, but he wasn’t sure what conditions he needed. He usually had only two or three such spots at each tournament. #Quip promo code nosleep series#The method still covers a lot of water, but it doesn’t require him to be as dialed in on a pattern or series of waypoints.Ĭox says he didn’t re-fish water too often. Instead, Cox prefers to identify stretches of bank, beds of grass, lily pad fields, pockets and the like and then fish every bit of it that looks good if the conditions suggest that he should. He can’t pull up to 100 precise targets in a day, make a few casts at each and leave. In describing his 2015 season, Cox compared some of his strategies to those of Bryan Thrift, who was neck-and-neck with Cox in the AOY race going into the finale on the Potomac River.Ĭox admires Thrift’s ability to perform both deep and shallow, but he says he’s not wired the same way as Thrift. He caught 12 pounds, 3 ounces that day and made the top-10 cut. The fish were fresh because no one had fished there.” I ran up there, and sure enough it was clear. The first two days I fished mid-lake and made the cut, and I figured by then it had cleared out. “I didn’t think anyone had gotten bit up there in practice. ![]() “I ran up there during practice and didn’t get any bites, but it was really, really muddy,” Cox says. Cox found one such hole at Beaver Lake so far up the White River that FLW’s media team considered borrowing a kayak in order to cover him. Sometimes that meant scouting water that, in practice, was practically unfishable. “Moving around, looking at every inch of water on the lake let me see where the boats weren’t fishing,” Cox says. In addition to looking for fishy waters, Cox also looked for areas that weren’t being pounded by other anglers. “The whole year I pretty much said I was going to do whatever it takes just to catch them and get paid,” Cox adds. He says that getting locked in on a pattern in practice has hurt him in the past because it’s so hard to abandon that pattern in the tournament when it dries up. Or I’d see some grass in practice when there were bright blue skies, but when there was rain or clouds in the tournament I’d go fish it because fishing bank grass is usually a morning thing or for low-light conditions.” “Sometimes I’d see a couple docks, but I’d look at them while it was raining in practice and think that maybe when the sun comes out I could fish them in the tournament. “Everything changes so much in a week, especially when we get there and the pressure gets on,” he adds. “I’d just look at it in practice and know I could catch fish there. “I ended up fishing a lot of places where I didn’t catch a fish or didn’t fish at all in practice,” he says. Rather, he sought to scout as much of the lake as possible so that he was prepared for any conditions he might face in the tournament. Oh, and spoiler alert: He will be using a transducer next season.Ĭox’ practice strategy this season was to not get locked in on a pattern. We boiled down the most important factors into 10 key lessons that can help any angler who wants to become a better competitive angler. For Cox, success was the result of a new approach to practice, an innate ability to adapt on the fly and some important lessons learned during competition. The fact that Cox took such an unconventional approach by modern tournament-fishing standards is noteworthy in itself, but how and why he did it goes a little deeper than simply dedicating himself to “fishing his strengths,” as pros so often quip. He fished only shallow – more or less – made four top 20s and came up 14 points shy of Scott Martin’s winning AOY point total. In his fifth season on the Walmart FLW Tour, John Cox nearly won the 2015 Angler of the Year award while fishing from a 19-foot aluminum bass boat with no depth finder transducer. ![]()
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