The Race for the Hot Spot
Posted on: June 14, 2006No comments yet
During the 31st NBAD tournament, the Deaf Bass fishermen go as pairs in the boat to help regulate the rules as they go out to find their prize of the highest calling-Bass! The NBAD event is a team tournament where a team of two contestants will fish together during the NBAD Tournament. Everyday they have to bring in the heaviest Lunker of the day. Our next move is to see who wins for all three days and the finals and who breaks records!
We went out again in Dave Cole’s Bass boat in a hapless effort to keep up with the motoring bass boats that race to the prime fishing spots, the Triton and other high performance boats are too fast for us to really keep up with. By the time they were gone, we found ourselves losing sense of our direction navigating the maze of the forks and lake arms the gigantic Table Rock Lake again like the other day. This lake is considered by many a Goliath-sized river that branches out into many creeks, and we did not know left from right; there are over 700 miles of shoreline to stare at.
We missed a turn where we should have followed the lake arms where the fishermen were going to and went way off course, and we became history. But thanks to Coles, the NBAD secretary who escorted us, for working with DeafNation’s Jed Barish in studying the map, while the lucky fishermen were studying their fish!
It took us an hour to reach to the first boat that secured its’ hot spot! It wasn’t unusual to see the high-performance boats zooming past us back and forth while we sort of floated around.
Boats rely in power and speed to overtake the best locations where it is swarming with Bass, or the faster boat will get there first. They also have more gas to go with and do not have to repeatedly fill in gas at the commercial docks like the older, slower boats have to. Dave had his boat since 1995; it is a good boat but just not high performance. We had to stay close to the gas pumps where he started from to guarantee we can reach all the boats we wanted to film for this story.
Hence, the fishermen who has the faster boats and bigger gas tanks will be able to avoid losing time and even follow the river all the way to Arkansas from the Missouri border to swoop up the flapping Bass.
The high performance boaters boast of overtaking hot spots before others do, but other people are content enough with preserving their gas so they can spend more time fishing and venture out farther if necessary. The boating technology set off a new revolution in the past 20 years producing faster boats with better engines and Electronic Fuel Injection (EFI) technology.
The water which is smooth like glass makes it convenient for the jetting fishers but the ones trailing will play it smart and follow these boats to avoid the choppy waters or the narrow stream created by the boat ahead.
The 15 inch rule for Bass is stricter here in the 31st annual event at Missouri to make it more difficult to win this event, but they want the Bass fishermen to sweat a little bit in finding one that meets the criteria of the tournament. In Arkansas, the rule stands at 13 inches, and California stands at 12! The next two National Bass Tournaments are in those states, with Mount Ida, Arkansas in 2007 and Clearwater Lake, California in 2008.
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