Winter 2018
to have to assess, target and catch your own by adjusting to what they do and making it work for you. That is where the versatility comes in to play.
#4 Be VERY OPEN-MINDED! You can work together with your travel partner in practice; but in
competition days, you are going
to get a different partner
every day and each one
is going to be doing
something different. You
never know what they
will be doing. It could be
something totally different
than you were doing in
practice or even thought of
in practice and you have to
be ready to adjust your
strategy to work with
that from the
back of their
boat. When I
get paired,
I don’t
even ask
my pros
what
they
are
®
doing. I just
wait until
we get to
a spot and
think about
the area we
are in, what I
learned in practice
and figure out something that I think will work. That is when I decide what I will throw. That is how I stay open-minded.
WB: How do you arrive prepared for competition without lugging everything
you own on the boat, with the depth of open-mindedness that you are describing?
HARAGUCHI: That is tough; but I like to start with only the stuff I have confidence in and then whittle it down from what I learned. I don’t want to have too much tackle; because then I can spend too much time digging through it or retying and that just cuts down on fishing time.
I use practice time to throw a lot of things and figure out what I am having some luck with and what I have confidence in. I will keep a few baits (that I think would work in the current situation, even if they didn’t pan out in practice) just in case. Sometimes this works out, because your pro might be in an area where a bait is working and that didn’t work for you in practice or you didn’t even try; but I don’t go crazy with these – I only have a few.
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