Like every other serious tournament angler, Elite Series pro Clark Reehm carries a boatload of essential equipment, including spare parts, tools, a first aid kit and enough tackle to fill most of your local tackle stores. If you ask him what the most important piece of emergency equipment is, his answer might surprise you.

“A heavy duty weigh-in bag is the item that most people leave out when outfitting their tournament boat” state Reehm. A weigh-in bag serves many purposes for a tournament angler. Besides its intended use, it can be used for comfort, fish care, and emergencies.

Comfort

Almost anyone who’s ever been in a boat has sat down on wet carpet at one point or another. Since it is waterproof, a weigh-in bag makes an excellent seat or carpet cover either early in the morning or after that rain shower passes through. It is also an easy, quick mat if you have to work under the console of your boat or change a tire on the way to the lake.

Fish Care

If you are catching fish deep and need to fizz them, it’s difficult to do inside of the livewell, especially if the lids have small openings. With a wide bag, you can put the fish in some water and fizz them outside of the livewell, separate from the other fish. This also eliminates the chance of a fish jumping out of the livewell while you are working on another fish.

If you are fishing a pro-am event where you don’t have use of both livewells, you can also use the bag for culling purposes. This gives you somewhere to put the fish while you are weighing them other than throwing them on the carpet and damaging their slime coat. 

Emergency Uses

If you fish enough tournaments, regardless of which products you use, breakdowns are going to happen. “If you’ve broken down and I stop to pick you up, you better have your stuff ready to go,” says Reehm. This includes having your fish in a bag that you can snatch out of the livewell and transfer to his boat all together. There simply isn’t time to transfer the fish one at a time.

Reehm’s number one use for his weigh-in bag is for failures in the livewell systems themselves. If a pump goes out, you can put a bunch of water into your livewells with a weigh-in bag instead of using a plastic container or tacklebox. Or if you run down the lake and see that the livewells have drained down during the run, you can refill them quickly using the bag rather than the pumps.

So, if you are an Elite angler, the guy who fishes the Tuesday night tournament at your local lake or somewhere in between, a heavy duty weigh-in bag is a must-have piece of boat equipment.

Sitting at home one evening contemplating whether or not to go down into the basement into my tackle room, or as my wife calls it “a mini Bass Pro Shops” to work on tackle management and my annual cleaning of the reels. However, before heading down I decided to check my e-mails. I received an e-mail from a young angler who has some experience fishing local club events and does relatively well in them but wants to make the step to the bigger larger tournament circuits. I get asked this question at shows regularly and I thought that I would write about making the jump to the larger circuits and what are some of the other questions that I’m asked when answering the original question.

The first question during this conversation usually goes something like this “I have a small boat, do I need a bigger boat to fish the bigger circuits?” Well, the answer to that is it depends on what circuits you are doing. If you are fishing a circuit like the BASS Opens or the FLW Berkley Series which are multiple day events on much larger bodies of water like Lake Erie, Lake Champlain, Potomac River, Santee Cooper Reservoir, the list goes on and on. These bodies of water are large where you can end up going 10, 20 plus miles to your fishing spot to get away from the traffic. Meaning with the larger events, the fields are larger. Anywhere from 150 to 200 boat fields and along with these larger bodies of water come rougher conditions. Unlike the weekend warriors, tournament anglers do not have the luxury of only fishing in nice, calm sunny days. You could be out fishing on Lake Erie or Lake Champlain with 4 to 6 foot waves. So the quickest answer is yes you will need to a larger boat. 19 to 21 foot boats with 200 plus horsepower motors become the norm for fishing these events.

The other thing that anglers do not factor in when contemplating making the move up is the increase in financial outlay as well as time away from home. These events are not all within an hour from your home. Therefore, traveling expenses will increase. Lodging/accommodations, fuel for the boat and truck will increase or be incurred as you are now further away from home. Which is something else to factor in during your decision process on whether or not to make the jump to the larger event circuits?

I digressed a little here. However, the above is all true but the one thing that I wanted to talk about is the buying of excessive tackle. I have seen in the past and it happens a lot is anglers spending a pile of money on tackle that is usually totally unnecessary. Having been a tackle store owner in the past I have seen anglers that want to fish the larger team events go and spend a lot of money on tackle because they think that is what they need to do. The key for any angler is to perfect a technique before moving onto another one. What I like to do is when I am out on the water I will bring specific bait with me and I will force myself to only use that particular type of bait the entire day. For example, pitching/flipping, I will bring only my flipping stick and nothing but jigs with me. I will go and flip and pitch all day long so that I can become familiar with what a jig does once it’s in the water. As well what it feels like when I get a strike and try to imagine what the jig is doing in the water every time that I move it. Then and only then once I have figured out what the jig is doing and have a firm understanding will I try a different technique, say drop shotting or throw a swimbait.

So to summarize, if you are going purchase new tackle make sure you become familiar with it’s application and effectiveness before going out and spending a pile of money on bait and/or technique that you are not comfortable or confident in throwing.

Thanks to peche en ligne for the footage. Check out their site at http://pecheenligne.net