With the much-anticipated Fluke ‘Til Ya Puke tournament coming up on Father’s Day weekend, you still have plenty of time to enter and then overthink the living @#$% out of your game plan. If you do it right, and perhaps heed a few of the following suggestions, you’ll be off-your- thorazine looney by the time D-Day arrives—so jingled up the morning of, your bathrobe flapping in the apparent wind— that the very sound of the word ‘fluke’ will trigger your gag reflex. Remember, the more voices you have going inside your head, the more ideas you’ll have when your plan A, subsection 4-L (lines 13-2 though 14-1) unravels the day of.
You really only need one fluke—one big one—to secure square-footage inside the winner’s circle. In the grand scheme of your career-long slab-search, that shouldn’t be too much to ask, provided you make good use of fishable time, avoid the three-ring sonic circus that is the VHF chatter, and try not to let the doubt drown out your instincts while 236 boats—like a swarm of houseflies in some amnesiac mania— zip hither and yon on the four points of the compass rose. Instead of wondering where everyone else is going, relish in the knowledge that every boat you observe racing toward the Siren song of elsewhere, rods clanking idly in their holders, is doing the one thing that absolutely guarantees he’s catching zero for the moment.
If you have the time or the contacts to sample some of your theoretical all-time, desert-island, big-fluke spots in the days leading up to crunch time, by all means rule out as much slabless seabed as you can—especially remote places you can’t readily fit into a sensible route without major backtracking.
The day of, stick to spots you know—or at least spots whose conditions mix you can unravel ahead of time—rather than taking a Hail Mary ride to one of the spots on the lips of
every flukeman in the village. Just to give at least one of the voices in your skull something to ponder while he cleans the imaginary guns, consider how easy it would be for someone with an overactive competitive streak to spread all kinds of disinformation just before the tournament, sending the competition to, say, Veatch Canyon when he knew damned well the tourney lunker lay right outside the harbor jetties?(!)
Plan to Beat Slack
One thing you can absolutely do ahead of time is grab a fresh, tight-bound copy of Eldridge’s, and pore over the current tables—or scroll over acres of light-blue chartplotter terrain pulling up tide details—to get a ballpark sense of the tidal lags between the spots you know you’ll want to fish. Consider that distinctly different tidal influences off Sakonnet, the East Passage, Point Judith, or Block Island may give you very different current timing for four spots—but one odds-on order in which to hit them. If you time your maneuvers right, you may avoid dreaded slack tide completely—or at least minimize its impact on your mood by taking a ride between spots just as drift speed would be bottoming out.
Fish Little Pieces
One of my favorite parts of fluking is the knowledge that it doesn’t take a whole lot of specialized bottom to harbor a couple of 12-pound welcome mats. And on a fluking day when Block Island and Rhode Island Sounds will play out like footage from the storming of the beaches at Normandy, it might well be to your advantage to get pretty @#$% far from the 40-boat herds grazing on Nebraska Shoals or the deeper lanes off Scarborough, where whatever fluke have taken up residence will be hunkered down, wishing they had ruby slippers or heels with which to click said slippers together and teleport themselves back to easier days crossing drag bottom out in 40 fathoms three months ago.
Don’t follow the big boats on tournament day; hit vacant “hunch spots” and places you once caught a 9-pound slab by mistake as you picked out your nephew’s personal-best backlash. And don’t think for a minute in a slow-developing season that any of the places there have been big numbers of squid after sundown won’t hold an occasional 8-pounder that’s running way ahead of the pack with the tentacled chuck wagon. And keep a ridiculous number of pre-tied rigs at the ready, and at least one extra rod.
Don’t Waste Drift
The operative concept in tournament fishing isn’t necessarily to fish hard every single second, but rather to observe two golden rules: First, when you finally get perfect conditions, fish carefully, keep a precise eye on the plotter and/or sounder to avoid hauling rigs over worthless real estate. Two, weigh idle time against the old certainty that you won’t catch anything with no line out— sometimes you catch your biggest fluke when you drift blind, punctuating five minutes of sinker art in muck with a fat 11-pounder pried from the gravel bed beyond.
The aforementioned extra rigs and rod are all about not wasting the right time while you have it. What you cannot afford is to squander 10 minutes per drift ransacking your tackle bag in search of the pink-with-rainbow-sprinkles teasers. In the course of three hours, sloppy drifting can cost you 45 minutes of real, rig-on-bottom time that might—were you something other than a complete mook—have been worth a trio of 10-pounders that would have made you feel like Godzilla when you thundered into the weigh station a few hours later. Don’t be the guy who still lives in his Grammy’s basement because he didn’t win Fluke Til Ya Puke because he forgot to mind his plotter or he didn’t have an extra rig tied up. Buddy System Voices in your head notwithstanding, if you have a friend or two fishing FTYP, maybe you can work together to cover ground quickly, call each other when you find some fluke worth working on.
Carry One Casting Rod
Simple/stupid as it sounds, take a rod you can use to cast- and-retrieve in the event your efforts are hindered by wind- against-tide or a ponderous tide change. The number of substantial fluke I’ve stolen during god-awful drift conditions just by figuring out which way we should have been moving and using a bucktail to cover that ground from a motionless boat is statistically significant.
Go Light
The Ancient Mariner’s Guide to Doormat Fluke stresses the importance of stout gear, but lighter weaponry affords you tons of advantages. For one thing, you’ll have less difficulty holding bottom with minimal lead if you stick with 20-pound braid of sewing-thread diameter; for another, lighter fluorocarbon leader gets more bites than heavy fluoro, no matter what is said about the material’s “invisibility.” When fishing’s slow and the clock’s running, one extra bite bought with downsized gear can change your outcome memorably.