Pre-fishing is an art and needs to be practiced and sharpened. There are many items that we use to attempt to nut things out but I’ll try break things down to 5 main points to help you with a successful pre-fish.
Tip 1:
First and foremost is do not sting the fish! Too many times I hear people say yeah “smashed it” in pre-fish and bomb out on comp day! We have been guilty in the past of it but have learnt our lessons and now tend to just catch them on comp day instead of trying to catch one or two to just make sure they’re bream.
Fishing hookless defiantly works and we do it more often than not.
Tip 2:
Use a map to plan your day and stick to it! Insight Genesis maps are perfect to screen shot an image then I’ll number spots in order of ease to fish them consecutively.
Try not to spend too much time at each spot as it’s more important to cover ground so you can check water temps & clarity etc as you are moving
Tip 3:
Use all your senses and technology to see fish and fish for them as an absolute last resort!
It’s important to teach yourself what bream look like on sounder images. Trust your previous knowledge of what bream do in similar areas in similar systems and we will sometimes take the punt that they are bream as in estuaries the odds are pretty good they are or won’t be far away.
Tip 4:
Find the bait find the fish! It’s a simple philosophy and it works for all species. We like to tick off 4 major items to justify a good hunting ground:
-Bait
-Wind
-Current
-Structure or cover
Bait is always number one though!
Tip 5:
If you find fish in a zone attempt to crack a pattern in similar zones.
Sometimes depths can be the similarity, sometimes structure, and other times it can be contours or edges.
Using maps like Insight Genesis is now a must and studying them before a pre-fish will help you join the dots a lot faster if you find a possible pattern.
It’s always important to trust your abilities, technologies and don’t double guess yourself. Sometimes you will make poor decisions and sometimes your decisions will be perfect but stick to your guns.
Nobody likes a copycat and like at school copying people will never teach you a thing so choose your own path and find your own direction as paying attention to what the boat next to you is doing will bend your mind and this can destroy your chances real quick!
Fishing Tournaments are 98% mind game, 1% knowledge and 1% luck so like Frankie says “Relax!”