1st Tournament of the Year-Dustin King

Just got in from Lake Okeechobee yesterday morning about 2:30am. Left the house at 4am Friday, drove 12hrs to chobee, fished a FLW college tournament Saturday, get in the truck and drive home....what makes a person put themself in a situation like that? I had several people ask me if "I went to the beach", "ate at some nice restuarants" ect...truth is no I didn't see the ocean and I ate food from home. Us fishermen do crazy things in order to chase our dreams of fishing for a living.
I am going to be completely honest, I had an awful tournament. I had never seen Okeechobee before and when I come through the lock and into the main water I could see land nowhere! That lake is deff the biggest body of water I have ever seen in my life! It's a lot like bass fishing in the ocean :) I started off the morning throwing a Zoom super fluke and a Go2bait product. I got a very limited amount of early morning hits around the south monkey box area and soon the morning bite was gone. I tried various other patterns, pitching jigs, rattle traps, chatterbaits ect...nothing working. Well, everything I fished of course was around 4ft deep because this is the average depth on OKeechobee. I personally am a deep water fisherman, I love throwing crankbaits, texas rig worm and things like that so I was very much out of my element.
Well after several hours of absolutely time wasting in the "skinny water" I decided to "stick with what I'm confident in". I managed to run south and get into the "rim canal" this has 12ft deep water and is more my "style". With just a couple hours left I tied on a crankbait and went to work doing my own thing. My partner caught a keeper on a spinnerbait, and I catch a short fish and lose one about 2 1/2 pounds on a lipless crankbait. After fishing for a while longer I catch a 2lbr on a Go2Bait 10in worm in Junebug color. Then we had to go weigh-in.
At the weigh-in the bite was obviously tough because a little over 11lbs won and I came in 23rd with just 3.3lbs. The moral of this blog to all of you that fish is to get you to focus on what you feel comfortable doing. I was so not use to fishing shallow and knowing what to look for that I did not feel confident. I will wonder what would have happened if I would have went to the rim canal earlier and fished my strength? If it possible that I could catch a limit of 2 1/2 pounders...VERY POSSIBLE! Always go with your strengths and fish what you feel confident doing and this will for sure help you become a more successful angler over a long period of time. Not all fish do the same thing, everybody told me to go sight fishing and fish shallow, that wasted critical hours for me. If we can learn that not all fish do the same thing at the same time and we can catch them fishing our style all year then we all will put more fish in the livewell and have heavier weights at the end of the day!
Good Luck Fishing,
Dustin King