THE LEARNING PROCESS By Bobby Brown

Dorena… Just hearing someone utter the word makes bass fishermen daydream of trophy size fish in a relatively small body of water. Bass clubs generally have a tournament or two here on their schedule but the larger tournament circuits generally stay away from Dorena because it simply isn’t equipped to handle a 35 boat tournament or larger. The American Bass North division wasn’t attracting those large fields and somehow Dorena ended up on the 2010 schedule! When we first saw this on the schedule in June we decided this would be one to skip because it would probably be filled with locals who would all fish in the same general area and make it frustrating to even find decent water to fish… but that part of the schedule just stayed in the back of our minds all season.

As June approached, the Amp Fishing Team reviewed the schedule and realized they were sitting in the top few teams for the Angler of the Year point’s race in two different divisions! This made Dorena really tough to skip because other teams could get an edge on us if there was low participation at this one tournament. We really didn’t feel comfortable going into a tournament without pre-fishing but after a few phone calls it sounded like there might only be a dozen boats show up due to a rough economy. We couldn’t help ourselves thinking of those big Dorena bass just sitting there waiting for us so we made the decision to go fish the tournament even without any practice days on the lake this year… This is where the learning process comes in.

The tournament day quickly approached and neither of us could sleep thinking about the possibility of getting a big limit of fish at Dorena. Around 3 am we got on I5 and headed south. We discussed strategy and both emptied everything we knew about Dorena to help each other make good decisions in hopes to finish at the top. Dorena’s clear water, grass flats, creek channels, fairly new populations of smallmouth bass, search baits, etc… We went through everything we could think of to virtually pre-fish in our heads before we got to the lake in hopes our previous knowledge would help.

When we got on the water and blasted off, we knew many boats would go to the creek channels and fish the grass and we were right. We got a good spot and started fishing hard. What we found through the day was the most stained water at Dorena we had ever seen. Heavy rains weeks before had flooded the creeks with cold water and we realized this was not the Dorena we knew. After several hours of no bites and watching other boats move around without catching fish, we decided to abandon our normal fishing areas and go search. We were desperate for a confidence fish. One fish in the boat can really do a lot to get a fisherman’s mental focus back during a tournament.

After searching for some water that looked more like what we were used to, we found a little cove that didn’t have cold water pouring into it. The water was a little clearer and had broken up pieces of wood floating in the back. This seemed like a great place to us and after a few casts to the back of the cove, I hear, “Fish – It’s a good one” and I scramble for the net. A fish over 5 lbs jumps and dives and both of us feel like it is an eternity before the fish is in the net. A couple of deep breaths and a high five and we have a big Dorena largemouth in the livewell. Our minds raced and thought’s of catching four more fish that size quickly became our goal! Imagine if we could come in with over 25lbs and win the whole thing….so we thought.

As the day went on, fishing was even tougher and we couldn’t find any places with clear water. A couple more bites were all we had the rest of the day but we went in to weigh in feeling like maybe we had a shot at some big fish money… until… the most incredible bag of fish ever brought to the scales in any Oregon or maybe even West Coast tournament was weighed in. It was unbelievable to see these fish one by one getting pulled out of the livewell. A buzz quickly surfaced about these guys losing a fish over 9 lbs at the boat that would have replaced a 7.5 lb’er. That couldn’t be right? Could it? Five fish over 7 lbs would be over 35 lbs! Ridiculous! When the fish hit the scales the winning weight at Dorena was a mind blowing 37.53 lbs beating the second place team by over 20 lbs!

This was a day not many people will forget. We added to our knowledge bank that day and realized pre-fishing may not have rewarded us with enough to get first place but we could have done better than we did. The learning process is all about taking your defeats and making yourself better from them. If we pre-fish and stick to our plans we can compete and realizing that makes a world of difference when fishing tournaments against some of the best fishermen on the West Coast.