Most people think that before a catfish tournament all one needs to do is go to the bait store buy several boxes of worms, dip bait or live bait. Whatever one prefers. For us there is more to it than that.
Virgil Agee Before a tournament my husband (Virgil) and I spend 1-2 days getting the certain kind of bait we want to use. Our bait comes out of creeks. This can consist of driving round trip 300 miles. With the water conditions (low) it has been hard to find creek with enough water to support chubs in them. We prefer to catch our own creek chubs and crawfish. This is a natural bait as opposed to store bought (which many are commercially). Since a catfish sense of taste is so acute many catfish anglers (as we do) believe they can smell and taste the difference. To give an example of the acuteness of their taste (this came out of Keith Sutton抯 book "The freshwater angler" fishing for catfish. Keith writes: On a catfish 6 inches there are more than a quarter of a million taste buds. Hmm..... Now figure out if you can how many would there be in a 10-15 pounder or yet a 100 pounder. Makes you think doesn抰 it? Moving along here...........
O.K., we now have the bait we want. In many cases here lately not as much as we want. It can take us as long as 4 hours to catch a half dozen creek chubs (the species we are looking for). Now we need to prefish and scout the water. Since we fish tournaments in other locations and states you have to take the time and scout the waters. On the Missouri and Mississippi rivers you will find trail and wing dikes. If one is not familiar with those you can put yourself in great danger and also cause a considerable amount of damage to your boat. Last year during a tournament in Washington, Mo. A team because of the fog knocked their lower unit off the boat by hitting a wing dike. Of course as mentioned along with becoming familiar with the river or lake one must scout for the fish, where they are located at. We look for structure, i.e, brush piles, selves, high mud banks anything that would be a good feeding locations for catfish. Of course much of this will depend upon the water conditions. High water, ow water the time of the year, etc.. Along with finding feeding areas we look for places that we can catch shad with a throw net. If we find a good location then we will come back the morning of the tournament and try to catch live shad to use for bait. Catfish tournaments can be difficult at times. Especially when Mother Nature does not want to cooperate. We have experienced the following: dodging lighting for 9 hours, sitting trough heavy downfalls of rain, shoveling several inches of snow of our boat sitting in hot sun with little breeze and the heat index 110-115. So why does one do it? For the competition. To be able to compete with other catfish anglers and hopefully place. When Virgil and I placed at the Chilicothe, Illinois tournament June24. We competed with 82 boats, 164 anglers. We finished with big fish a 12 pound channel. That was exciting. All past negative experiences disappear at that moment. The only thing we could think of was "Thank you, God we made it". Along with the competition factor there is also the fact we have met allot of good people and have made several friends through the catfish tournaments. We have friends in Kansas, Illinois, South Dakota, Of course our home state Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Arkansas just to name a few. For the friends and knowledge we have acquired through this tournaments all the hardship was worth every penny of it and every moment of it. There is allot of hard work with this sport as with any other sport. It requires dedication, practice and trail and errors. To be successful in tournament fishing it takes time. Although we wish we could dedicate more time to fishing and prefish but as with all of us we have to work and pay bills. But with each tournament we acquire knowledge, the do抯 and do not抯 that help us for the next one. And that is what it is about, trails and errors, learning from them. Even after 2 years of tournament fishing you would think we would be used to it and not have the pre-tournament jitters. I still have them the restlessness the night before, butterflies in my stomach, and on and on. Oh, well I think that is something I will just learn to live with. Because it is worth every bit of it.
