Story by Hunter Sales | Photos by Tanner & Travis Lyons
As excited as I am about the upcoming NPFL event on Douglas Lake in Jefferson County, Tennessee — my home water! — I also know that tournaments in your backyard can bring some unique challenges. Having spent hours upon hours on a body of water should certainly help you, right? But having the right balance between utilizing your knowledge and evaluating current conditions is key, but not always easy to accomplish. To cap things off, it will be interesting to see how being unable to utilize forward-facing sonar affects my ability to be efficient.
I look for Douglas Lake to fish very well in this event with a majority of the field weighing-in 10-11 pounds a day, with 12 pounds a day getting a check! This lake is chock-full of fish. The key will be catching those 4-pound kickers to put you around that 15 pound per day mark to win.
Knowing every isolated brush pile, dock, and piece of structure on the bank should theoretically help my odds. However, the major flooding that we had from Hurricane Helene certainly altered a lot of the wood structure and even the river channel itself. One of the biggest challenges will certainly be figuring out which area in which to spend most of my time. In the past, I’ve messed up in home lake events by trying to fish everything that I know during each competition day and never really settling in. Experience has taught me that my best events typically come from fishing one area rather than being spread out.
The correct way to approach a home lake event is to spend your practice in the same way that you would spend any other practice period—fishing to determine the primary pattern, the best way to catch a kicker, and what areas seem to be the easiest to get bit in. Then you can apply your local knowledge to what areas hold the biggest fish, what is getting overlooked by most competitors, and what stretches are most likely to be fished by others. This can help you determine your rotation and how to fish ahead of others rather than behind them. Oftentimes, this is the difference between a solid event and one that you will struggle in. You can locate the best places, but if you are constantly fishing behind someone, it can be very difficult to get the ball rolling.
I wish I could ignore the pressure aspect of home lake events, but it is an unfortunate reality. I expect to catch them. My family, friends, and sponsors expect me to catch them. In the past, I’ve let slow starts in these events rattle me a bit, but with age comes a greater ability to put this out of my mind. The way I’ve explained it to others is: “I’ve got my butt kicked enough by now that I don’t worry about it anymore.” I’m going to go out and fish the way that gives me the best chance to have success, and I’m not going to worry about the rest of it. In the right frame of mind, it should be a fun week sleeping in my own bed and seeing a bunch of familiar faces around weigh-in.
As we get closer to May, I’m getting more and more excited for this event to get underway. The fine folks with the Jefferson County, Tennessee Department of Tourism always roll out the red carpet, and I have no doubt that all the NPFL anglers and fans will have a great week. I’m getting all my nuts and bolts tightened up and ready to go for this one!
See y’all at the scales!
Hunter Sales – Angler Profile
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