Bass Digest: All Anglers experience bad days on the water, days when things just don’t seem to go your way. Was there any point in the last season when this happened to you and what did you do to overcome this?
Freddie Steyn: Introduction to this level of bass fishing was awesome and daunting at the same time. The pressure that goes with this level of tournament fishing is simply astounding.
On the 3rd day I knew I had to show some fight and get a proper bag. All went well as I boated 5 keepers early on. The problem was that the bass I caught at the Vaal were small in size and all my keepers where bordering on the 300mm mark. I just could not catch decent size bass. I caught over 12 bass that day but all “dinks”. I even went into holes under willows where no boat has gone before trying to upgrade my bag.
To add insult to injury, I hooked into a proper fish feeling like at 4kg kicker, only to land a beautiful carp.
About 30 minutes to go I landed a bigger bass and I proceeded to cull out the smallest. This is when things went a bit pear-shaped.
I had my two larger bass in my one live well and the other smaller bass in the other. I had to cull one bass so I weighed them. The one was about 100g heavier than the other, so I culled out the lighter one. To this day, I do not know how it happened, but the lighter one that I culled was a length bass and the heavier one that I had kept was a single centimeter short of 300mm.
Needless to say I tried my heart out to catch another keeper in the last 10 minutes but to no avail. I only weighed in 4 bass for that day.
The lesson learnt out of this whole debacle is to take your time when you catch a bass during a tournament to immediately measure, weigh and mark it with a tag. Know you bag size at all times, this makes it much easier at the end of the day when your concentration levels are down and prevents you from making mistakes like I did.
Bass Digest: Catching the heaviest 5 fish in every tournament is always the goal every angler hopes to achieve. What advice would you offer to any angler wishing to increase the size of fish they wish to catch?
Represented S.A. in 7 Internal Tests
Member of the Protea Team from 2004-2010
Bass Federaton Nation Alabama S.A. Representative
Currently Fishing Y-Bass
Bass Digest/August, 2014