Confidence is the key!

Confidence is Key
I love throwing crankbaits, especially big ones. When Strike King Lure Company came out with the Seiries 6XD I immediately fell in love. My brother, on the other hand, loves to throw a weedless, hollow bodied frog. He is deadly with it. We both know our strengths so we try to use them to our advantage when fishing a tournament. This year I struggled early on in the summer on my home lake of Kinkaid. I just could not figure out why I wasn’t catching fish on a crankbait. But persistence and patience paid off. One day out on the lake I decided to run through some different colors and see if I could find one that they would bite. After the fourth color I finally found it. Sorry but I am not going to say but it is one of the XD colors. Anyway, the bass would smoke it. I don’t know why but they did.
In September there are always two tournaments my brother and I fish. They are back to back and we have been very blessed to have done well in the past. We stumbled bad last year and it was time to redeem ourselves this year. In practice, the bite was brutal. Most days I would only catch one keeper, but it would be a nice one and other days I would only catch short fish. The key was that I was confident enough that I could throw that crankbait and catch fish.
Tournament day rolls around and it is cloudy and rainy. It was not good crankbait weather but my brother was pumped up saying that he could catch them on a frog. We hit our first spot without a strike. The next spot I had one miss my Rage Toad and Lee threw back in on him. He let the bait settle before twitching it. Three shorts pops and it disappeared. Keeper number one. He caught two more shorts and we left. The next stop I threw a Strike King Ocho into a hole in the grass and pulled keeper number two out. We ran several spots before Lee connected with number three on a 10 inch Thumper worm. Finally the sun started peeking through the clouds and I picked up my crankbait. I caught several short fish before putting the fourth one in the box. I filled out our limit by flipping a jig on the edge of the grass. We were excited just to have a limit in such brutally tough conditions. Around 2 o’clock I caught a nice three pound fish on the crankbait and was able to cull one fish. We ended winning the tournament with 15 pounds. We had little time to celebrate because we had to prepare for the next day’s event. A cloudless calm morning met us on Sunday. Lee wanted to throw his frog and he went to work quickly by boating one keeper and five shorts. The bite died so we headed out deep where Lee caught number two on a Rage Tail Thumper worm. I was catching quite a few short fish when my crankbait rod loaded up. I knew it was big but I didn’t know how big. Lee netted the five pound fish that had one hook in the top of his nose. We gave each other high fives. We spent the rest of the day catching small fish after small fish but only ended up with the three. At the weigh in our three fish for ten pounds was good enough for fourth place. It was a good weekend for us. We were very blessed to have caught what we caught. Confidence in any sport plays a huge role in the outcome. Keeping a good positive attitude and being confident not only in the bait, but myself and my brother, is what made it all happen.