A tournament in Wisconsin – My Shadow
We started a small bass club to fish lakes at night for one year and the next year we started a larger club with about 20 members or so and moved to the big river to hold tournaments. In the small clubs guys quickly figured out I was the guy to follow, I could find fish.
Anyone who does well has the masses trying to tear him down and that is what happened to me. After a year of small club tournaments and attracting followers, I moved to fishing big tournaments and city open tournaments. I met one guy who I worked with who was supposed to be a top bass fisherman, he will tell you all about it. No one was better at working people, as getting information was his game. Once he heard I was good at finding and catching fish, I became his target which still goes on to this day, 40 years later. I will call him shaky because it’s fitting.
————
Wisconsin Open Pool 9, 1987
Working a swing shift at a steel mill, I got off work and drove 4 hours up to De Soto and rented a cabin and headed out fishing. I did not know it, but shaky was going to fish the same tournament.
I fished one area and didn’t find much. I looked back and I was being followed. I started the motor and idled over to see who it was and it was shaky. That year after I bought a bass boat from him and now he became my shadow on the water. He got a cabin next to mine somehow. He knew I could find fish and was afraid I would find the area where others were catching fish.
Back at the cabin that evening I was studying a map. The river was rising fast and I was looking for clean water. Shaky stopped by and came in. He started yelling at me when I pointed out an area that should have cleaner water. He called me names and when I started looking further north on pool 8 he agreed that was worth checking.
He has connections and his way of pre-fishing is to talk on phones while mine was to study maps and hard work. The next day I looked all day and found nothing. I went back north again the next day and looked back and that same boat was following me again and so I took a photo of him doing that. This was around 1987.
Come tournament day I didn’t have much, so when I drew out a partner who didn’t have a boat, but knew where others found fish, so that was a good thing. He was working for the tournament organization. So the morning of the tournament he told me where he had fish located. It was the same area I pointed out on the map to my stalker! I wasted 2 days for nothing. He got me on that one.
So we pulled into his spot since my spots didn’t pan out. It was a great area and I started catching big fish right away. I had 4 nice 3 pounders. I casted up to catch my 5th fish for the win and it turned out to be a pike. Then I unhooked and casted back in the same area and a huge splash, a fish blew up on my lure, but I missed him. I thought for sure its another pike so I told my partner, who hadn’t had a bite all day, to take him. He said no, you could win, but I insisted.
It turned out to be a big bass. Well at least he had something to weigh in which matters in a circuit. Then he kept telling me we need to head back, we are cutting it close. As I was idling out to deeper water I made one last cast and hook a big bass but it got off as I was going too fast with the motor. He was freaking out on the time, so I quick tore off, ran across stump fields and islands since the river was flooded and bee lined it straight to the weigh in. Again I got 5th being one fish sort of a limit and let another win slip away.
