Troy Weber and Dustin Casmey are longtime tournament partners who have won tournaments and Anglers of the Year together. Great partners make for great tournament results.
Tournament Fishing Advice from a Director
with Brad Durick
These tips from seasoned catfish tournament director Brad Durick can help you achieve success when you start fishing competitively.
Most of you will recognize Brad Durick’s name. He’s one of the country’s best-known catfish guides (redrivercatfish.com), the author of two books about catfishing and a regular contributor to CatfishNOW. What you may not know is that Brad also has a long history as a catfish tournament director. In 2015, he created what is now the Scheels Boundary Battle Catfish Tournament, a unique event that operates two days on two different sections of the Red River of the North in Grand Forks, North Dakota and East Grand Fork, Minnesota. This tournament differs from others because it has payouts based on categories—win more categories and get a bigger check. The real prize is for participating anglers to get their names on the Scheels Catfish Cup that resides at the local Scheels store.
In 2017, at the request of the local chamber of commerce, Brad also took over the Drayton Rod and Reel Rally in Drayton, North Dakota. Over the years, that event has evolved into the Catfish Capital Challenge Tournament and is the first such event with $10,000 guaranteed for first place on the Red River. It fills every year and is the final tournament of the season on the Red.
Brad also hatched the idea of a tournament upstream on the Red in Moorhead, Minnesota, a smaller one-day event that brought tournament fishing to the area. It is still a growing work in progress and is now known as the Marley Concrete Cats Tournament. He helps with many events for the Red River Valley Catfish League as well, often assisting with weigh-ins and social media.
Because of his rich experience as a tournament director, we asked Brad to offer his advice for anglers who want to become involved in competitive catfishing for this special issue of CatfishNOW. In that position, he has seen what worked and what didn’t work. He knows who tends to be the heavy hitters and who might need a little help putting it all together to be great.
Some of the tips and tricks he shares are pretty simple, and some might be hard to do for someone trying to get into tournament fishing. Either way, they are from the perspective of one of the country’s most experienced tournament directors and could help you in your efforts to become a successful tournament participant. That said, here in his own words is some tournament fishing advice from Brad Durick.
Meet the Other Anglers
Depending on your personality, this one may be easy or not so easy. Take the time to introduce yourself to anglers you don’t know. Try to not get in the way while people are getting ready or trying to launch but meet a few people at the boat landing, the rules meeting or the weigh-in.
Catfish anglers tend to be a friendly bunch and will answer questions or even give a tip or two. Getting to know everyone makes you look good and can help you in spades as to current conditions. Be friendly and you may pick up a few tips and tricks.
Watch Other Anglers
In no way, shape or form is this telling you to jump in on someone’s spot, but pay attention to where people are fishing—not the spot necessarily but the kind of spot. Make a mental note (especially on day one of a multi-day tournament) of the structure or pattern they are on. If a team does well then you should know about what they were fishing. Then you can replicate the pattern.
This may not help in a tournament now, but it may be a pattern you have never tried and you can go back and learn so if you need it at a later time you have it in your arsenal.
Get a Solid Partner
Many tournament anglers fish with friends or, in some cases, whoever they can find to be a partner. To really be successful over time, find a partner who you not only get along with but someone you can work with in an almost automatic sense. A good partner should be on the same wavelength as you without even speaking. Also, make sure this partner has great netting skills to avoid any possible heartbreaks.
As a tournament director, it seems to me that the better teams who always place near the top are longtime partners who are in sync with each other. They might be hindered when the fish don’t cooperate on a specific day, but more often than not they will find active fish.
Spend More Time on the Water
The more time you spend on the water honing your craft, the better. This is common knowledge, but many anglers spend weekends and time off at tournaments and find little time to learn new techniques or test gear. While you can and will learn a ton in a tournament, it is a stressful situation under a time limit to try to put things together.
One suggestion that seems unpopular but makes sense is to take time off from tournament fishing and spend the time learning and practicing. In some cases, it can pay to take an entire season off and plan to fish different places with different people to learn and hone the craft. If that is not in your cards, just take a couple events off to use the learning time.
Using this time to just fish and learn will allow for time to fail when trying new things or patterns. If you pay attention to your “practice,” for lack of a better term, when you get into the contest, you will have everything in order and be not only better at catching fish but more efficient.
Adjust Your Prefishing Tactics
Prefishing is an area where most tournament anglers wreck their chances for success. Before every tournament, there are pictures of great fish on social media that say, “It’s going to be a great tournament!” The thing is the anglers spend the days up to the event pounding the water they want to fish during the tournament, only to say, “If we just could have caught what we did in practice.”
This prefishing is anglers shooting themselves in the foot by fishing the best fish out of their spots. This is not to say the next team won’t hit that same spot, but what if they didn’t and you sore-lipped the best fish in the area. There are ways to prefish without wrecking spots.
If you must prefish, consider fishing a spot having a self-Imposed one-fish limit. If you catch a fish, pack up and leave before you catch another one and wreck the spot.
Another idea is to thread bait onto a line with no hook. Just judge the bite off the pull-down. The fish will get the bait and not get stung by the hook.
One great way to pattern fish is go somewhere nearby but not in the tournament water to get a pattern together. An example of this occurs when a dam is the boundary for the tournament that is not that far away. Usually, the catfish will pattern the same even in a different section of river. Go prefish to your hearts content and establish the pattern out of the boundaries, then spend the last day or so using electronics to match the structure and pattern without even touching the fish.
These are just a few of the things one learns from directing tournaments and getting to know everyone and their tactics. Here’s hoping the tips just shared will help you become better tournament angler. May good fortune be with you.
