Secret to success as a coangler with Gary Haraguchi

Gary Haraguchi King of the Co Anglers FLW Tour AOY Champion by Jody Only

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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