Erik Landesfeind - SWBA Tournament Trail

LA Chace
Mar. 7 2011, 12:40 AM

LA Chace

The second event of the 2011 SWBA Season is rapidly approaching, and in less than a month, teams will face off for the "LA Chace." This strangely named tournament, which will be hosted at Chace Park in Marina Del Rey on April 2nd, is an "open" event, and teams will be allowed to weigh calicos, sand bass and spotted bay bass. Historically, this venue has produced lots of big bass and at last year's event, 8 teams weighed bags of over 20 lbs. That tournament was won with a giant 31.54-lb bag of sand bass weighed by Team "Walls Out" (Eric Johnson and Rick Trujillo).

In their constant quest to keep things fresh while keeping anglers out of their fishing comfort zones, the tournament directors made some big changes to this year’s event. The first change was to move the event from its usual early summer schedule date to the beginning of April. The second was to set boundaries for the event that require teams to fish between Pt. Fermin (at the south end of Palos Verdes) and the tip of Pt. Dume. Considering that last year’s winning bag came from Huntington Beach and the winning bag at the 2009 event came from above Pt. Dume, the event’s scheduling and boundaries are going to force a lot of teams to rethink their strategy.

My partner Matt Kotch and I, who make up Team Snook Hunter, are one of the teams that’s having to work hard at figuring things out. We’ve pre-fished the Santa Monica Bay three times in the last month and don’t have a limit of bass to show for it (even if we total up our catches from all three trips). The only bright note is that every other team that I’ve spoken with is having similar results. The problem is that the entire bay (as well as most of PV) is completely polluted with bait. In early February there were massive amounts of squid everywhere and as of the beginning of March, it’s vacated the area but has been replaced with miles and miles of finbait. When I say miles and miles, I mean it. Matt and I fished on March 4th and ran from Marina Del Rey down to Rocky Point and then as far north as Malibu. Throughout the entire day, we never ran more than a quarter mile without encountering huge schools of bait on the meter or giant bird schools crashing on bait.

There has been a lot of finbait on the coast over the last 6 months, but the amount in the bay right now is absolutely ridiculous. The Santa Monica Bay has 5 different sets of artificial reefs and we fished 4 of them (Redondo, Hermosa, Marina Del Rey and Santa Monica). Everywhere we went the story was the same, pull up on the numbers, get a couple small marks, idle forward and BAM 30-60 feet of bait on the meter. When we pulled up to the kelp at PV it was more of the same, just miles and miles of bait. Malibu was the only area that wasn’t overloaded with bait, but off color water and lack of conditions made it equally unappealing.

I’ve got high hopes that the bait will clear out by tournament day, but if it doesn’t teams are going to have to fish hard and hope to get lucky. Sure, one or two teams will hit the jackpot and put together a big bag like someone manages to do in every tournament, but this event definitely isn’t going to be a flamethrower. I’m not really one for prognostication, but I’d say that it’s only going to take a bag in the low teens to make the podium at this one. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if I’m right or wrong…

After my initial blog was posted, a good friend and tournament rival (read as arch nemesis) pointed out that I conveniently “forgot” to mention how Team Snook Hunter did in the last event. I’m sure that he was just trying to twist the knife a little, but I figured that I’d share our horrible finish as an example of what can go wrong on tournament day. Though we’ve both been fishing our entire lives, Matt and I are fairly new to tournament fishing (this is the start of our 3rd year) and the biggest hurdle that we’ve had to face is the mental angle of the game.

I was feeling pretty bad about our 48th place finish in the “ Border Town Brawl” until I watched the Bassmasters Classic on TV last week. If you missed it, three of the top 5 anglers where fishing in a small area and were all within sight of one another during all three days of the event. Aaron Martens who was the day one leader stumbled on day two and fell behind Kevin Van Dam who was fishing right next to him. On day three, KVD started out hot and just kept getting hotter throughout the day. Martens continued to struggle on day three while watching KVD catch fish after fish and the camera caught a close up of his mental breakdown. It was late in the day and Martens had just watched KVD put another big fish in the boat. He turned to the camera and said something along the lines of, “Oh, that’s just great. Kevin wasn’t even paying attention on that one. He’s talking to the cameraman and gets bit and just winds in another 6 lber. Oh, no big deal, just another 6 lber on day three of the Classic…” At that point, I knew that Martens was mentally beaten and that it was over for him (well that and the fact that KVD had a 10 lb lead), but what made me feel better was the realization that even the best of the best struggle sometimes and they are not immune to mental breakdowns.

Now let’s get back to our “Border Town Meltdown”…
Matt and I hadn’t done a lot of pre-fishing for the event, but in the three days that we did, we had excellent fishing and caught lots of big Spotties. We’d caught fish in 5 different locations in the north end of the bay, so on tournament day we planned to cycle through those different areas and we figured that we had a good shot at doing really well. At the captains meeting before each event, the tournament directors randomly draw a team number to establish the order in which the boats will start and we ended up dead last. The half hour that we waited at the starting line on tournament morning was excruciating because I was sure that there would be someone already on the small spot that I wanted to start. When our number was finally called, we burned rubber to our spot and found that we had it to ourselves.

The tide was still a little low for the shallow part of our spot to bite, but there was a deeper area adjacent to it where we’d caught a few so we started fishing. I got bit on my second or third cast and it was a good one. Matt ran over with the net, but our hopes were dashed when a 3 lb Sand Bass came into view. We kept fishing and I caught 5 or 6 more sand bass before Matt stuck our first Spottie. The fish was a lot smaller than the ones we’d seen in pre-fishing, but what the hell, at least we had our first fish in the tank. Right about that time we saw another team pull up to a line of mooring cans that was going to be our second spot, so we decided to run over and fish the other end of the cans before they cleaned all of the fish off the entire stretch. This was a long string of moorings (over 300 yards), so we let them have the first half of it and started about halfway down. This was the area that we’d caught the biggest fish in practice, but again the fish were smaller on tournament day. By the time we’d reached the end of the cans, we’d put two more legals on the boat along with a handful of shorts and more Sand Bass.

At that point, we decided to head back to our initial spot and try to fill out our limit. When we arrived, we found the boat that we’d seen earlier sitting on the spot and catching fish. We pulled up on a nearby spot and caught nothing. After watching the other boat pull in what seemed like a dozen legals, we decided to make a move to the next area in our game plan. This spot had three boats on it, so we moved on. Our next stop produced for us, but it was more Sand Bass. In pre-fishing, we’d done best on the incoming tide and now we were faced with a high slack tide, 3 fish in the boat and no idea what to do…

Instead of sticking to our game plan, we decided to go back and see if the other boat was still on the spot that we had wanted to fish. I don’t like fishing behind people, but I was hoping that the spot might have reloaded. To my surprise, the same boat was still sitting on it continuing to catch fish. We tried the nearby spot that we’d fished earlier and I missed a couple bites on the spinnerbait. Missing bites sucks, but when you’re struggling in a tournament, it’s devastating… After watching the other team catch fish for too long, we left in disgust and headed for the last stop on our itinerary. As we cruised up, we saw several teams driving away from the spot with smiles on their faces and coincidentally, they were the same teams that took the tops spots on the podium later in the day. At this point, time was running out and we were mentally down for the count. We toughed it out and ended up catching a handful of shorts before we had leave, but our heads weren’t in the game and we dumped the two bites that seemed like bigger fish. Needless to say, we ran back with our tails firmly between our legs…

I learned a couple of important tournament fishing lessons during this event. The first is to stick to your game plan. I’m not saying that we would have caught fish if we had pulled into our final area three hours earlier as we’d planned, but it would have been a better choice than beating a dead horse in the areas that we did fish. The other was to not get psyched out when other teams are catching fish and you aren’t. These are tough lessons to learn and as we saw during the Classic, even the pro’s can fall into that trap. But going forward, I’m going to fish the way that I plan to fish even if I have to put blinders on to do it…

Well, that’s about it for now. But, I invite you to join me again after the “LA Chace” and I hope to have better news to report.

Cesar Chavez
March 8, 2011, 1:03 pm

Looks like the too much Bait issue is solved, according to today's L.A. Times.

Raul Martinez
March 7, 2011, 12:45 pm

Great article I look forward to reading many more.

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Erik Landesfeind - SWBA Tournament Trail

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