Competitive bass tournaments go back nearly 50 years and at one time it was every young bass fisherman”s dream to become a full-time pro and earn thousands of dollars. While bass tournaments are still popular. the sport has reached its peak and is declining.
A good example of this decline was the Angler”s Choice Tournament of Champions held last weekend at Clear Lake. More than 100 teams qualified to fish the event and were in the running to win a new bass boat, but only 62 teams took part. The tournament was extremely well run and the tournament officials deserve credit, but the fishermen just didn”t show up.
Most bass tournaments are team event events during which a pair of fishermen team up and compete together. Twenty years ago a typical team tournament would draw a minimum of 50 boats and it wasn”t unusual to draw in excess of 100. Those days are long gone. Now a tournament is considered successful if it draws 20 boats. A team tournament held a few weeks ago drew only three boats. This year most of the team tournaments on Clear Lake have drawn only 10-15 boats. The number of tournaments held on the lake has dropped as well. The Department of Fish and Wildlife (DFW) has issued only 24 event permits for Clear Lake for 2015. In past years the number of event tournaments requiring permits exceeded 50.
The good news is that specialty tournaments, such as the upcoming Triton Boat Owners and FLW tournaments, are still popular and should draw in excess of a 100 boats. They are the exception, however. The poor turnouts can be traced to a number of factors and it isn”t the poor fishing. It”s primarily the expense of competing in today”s tournaments. Typically a visiting fisherman will spend upward of $1,000 to compete in the team event. That includes gas for the truck and boat, motel fees, food costs and tournament entry fees. A tournament circuit normally consists of six or seven tournaments with a Tournament of Champions taking palce at the end of the season, That adds up to roughly $6,000 per year, which takes a big slice out of the family budget.
The other major factor in the decline of bass tournaments is that in most families the wife handles the budget. When she goes through the family budget and sees the money being spent on fishing tournaments she starts to have second thoughts about supporting her husband”s sport. There is also the time spent away from the family. The wife is left home with the kids for six weekends out of the year while the husband is off fishing and that doesn”t make her happy.
A third factor is that bass tournament fishing may have reached the end of the its popularity. The sale of new bass boats reflect this. Most of the boat dealers will tell you their business is down at least 30 or more percent. A new bass boat can cost as much as $70,000 and about all it is good for is fishing for bass. In other words, it”s not a family boat. It wasn”t that many years ago when you could buy a bass boat for less than $30,000, but not anymore.
It”s not just the boats that have become expensive. The price of fishing equipment has gone through the roof. A new casting rod can cost as much as $500 and that”s without a reel. The fishing lures are also expensive. Take the new swimbaits; some of them can cost as much as $200. The old days of paying $10 for a lure are long gone. In fact, the lures have become so expensive that a fisherman hired a professional diver earlier this year to look for his swimbait lost in the deep water near Anderson Island. The lure was never found.
The late Harvey Naslund was the tournament director for the Western Outdoors bass tournament circuit for many years and he often told me that he could only keep a tournament fisherman for about four years before he would quit tournament fishing. In other words, he had to keep drawing new fishermen into the sport.
All this doesn”t mean bass fishing is dead. It just means that a lot of tournament fishermen will switch to recreational fishing and may only compete in one or two specialty tournaments a year.
