Avoiding the prime area due to crowds kept Texas out of serious contention.
Clichéd, but accurate, hindsight typically does offer the mental clarity comparable to perfect 20/20 vision. Seeing is one thing; learning, improving, growing from mistakes and misjudgments — that’s what makes us better. Here’s an example from Lee Livesay.
Event: 2024 Bassmaster Elite at Toledo Bend
There is such a thing as knowing too much and Livesay said that’s precisely what stung him during this late February event. No stranger to Elite success, the Texas standout has raised blue trophies at Lake Chickamauga (2020), and his Lake Fork home waters (2021, 2022).
Livesay finished 43rd in this season-opener at the Sabine River reservoir straddling the Louisiana/Texas border, but while it could have been much worse, he also knows it could have been much better. That truth was made abundantly clear to him as tournament winner Kyoya Fujita and many of the top finishers did their work exactly where Livesay figured they would.
“That year, forward facing sonar was a thing, pinging minnows was a thing and we were all getting into it from the year before,” Livesay said. “The first event of the year, it was prespawn on a gigantic lake.
“I know the lake fairly well, so I know where the giants get and I know where it goes down. I was pretty good with forward facing sonar, I had a good event and made the cut. But during the tournament, I never fished where I knew it goes down. I didn’t even try.”
The Housen Bay area on the lake’s southwest side ended up kicking out the majority of the top totals. Livesay said he was very familiar with that region, but he was not comfortable staking his event in what he considered a well-known big-fish area.
“East Texans know where it goes down and I know just enough down there where I tried to be sneaky,” Livesay said. “I tried to go north and do this, I tried to stay around takeoff and do this. There are so many fish in that lake and there are good ones everywhere.
“But when I saw where it really went down and where guys made the Top 10, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I could have shown up blind and caught them in there.”
What I Faced: Describing unseasonable warmth, Livesay said the prespawn migration was ahead of schedule, with lots of fish moving shallow. Just a couple years earlier, this would have been the recipe for old-school bank tactics, but Livesay said the age of modern technology simply offered a much better opportunity.
“You saw some guys with shallow power-fishing local knowledge not even make the cut,” he said. “The water was almost 70 degrees and we were catching 5-pounders on the bank, in grass, in cypress trees.
“Several guys said there were some really good fish up shallow, but you could not compete with the fish that were floating right offshore in certain areas. That’s one that I wish I could do over because it would have been really fun to be down there with those guys catching gigantic bags of fish.”
What I Did:
With relatively stable conditions that allowed anglers to run wherever they wanted, Livesay said he practiced from the takeoff area at Cypress Bend, to the Pendleton (Hwy. 6) Bridge. With the warm weather, he was thinking traditional prespawn habitat, like hydrilla, stumps, willows, and cypress trees.
He was not completely off-base, but the numerical advantage was with the offshore guys.
“You go in there in practice and catch a couple 5- or 6-pounders and you’re like, ‘Okay, I can compete, but in reality, there were so many hundreds of thousands of bass in Toledo Bend that were still out there roaming around on bait that are even bigger than those you caught in the back of a creek,” Livesay said. “You had to put two and two together and realize that there were many more out there that were probably fatter and more willing to bite.”
The early goings of Day 1 saw Livesay catch a few shallow fish on a bladed jig and a spinnerbait, but for the rest of his time, spotting deep fish on forward facing sonar produced the majority of his weight. He did most of his business with a Sixth Sense Juggle Minnow on a Sixth Sense Finesse Minnow Jig Head.
“I just did it in the wrong areas where there weren’t as many; where they weren’t as big,” Livesay said. “I knew exactly where it was gonna go down and I never even went to it.”
What Made the Difference: Livesay said the Housen Creek area offered the ideal prespawn scenario.
“It was mainly an area thing where the biggest fish in the lake wanted to transition from the main lake, which is 100-foot deep with timber and into the mouth of the creek,” he said. “There’s kind of a pinch point, where they can go right into a pocket, or they can go left into this main gigantic bay.
“It’s a couple mile section, but there are some sweet spots that are very well known, very obvious that this is where the biggest fish in the lake want to be and they’re gonna funnel through there. The guys in the Top 10 utilized it to the max.”
Lauding Fujita’s impressive performance, Livesay said the Japanese star’s ninja-level mastery of forward facing sonar clearly anchored his win. However, in Livesay’s view, there’s no overstating the critical factor — location.
“The best of the best went down there and competed and Kyoya won, but he was in the right area to get it done,” Livesay said. “Where I fished, it was textbook; there were fish suspended on bait and fish suspended on timber — stumps, or a big tree.
“It was Prespawn 101, I just didn’t have as many 6-plus pounders to compete as those guys did down there. I’d catch one or two 6s or 7s a day and those guys were throwing at 100 of them a day. I just didn’t have enough giants.”
What I Learned: Leaving Toledo Bend with a check and good points to start the year, Livesay realized he did the right thing, but not in the best place. That, he said, took him out of serious contention and left him with an undeniable lesson.
“I didn’t go to the area where the tournament was won because I thought it was going to be too pressured,” Livesay said. “I knew it was that good, everybody knew it was that good, so I was like, ‘I’m gonna stay away from that crowd and try to compete; when in reality, it was so good, it didn’t matter the pressure.
“Looking back, if you know an area is good, you gotta either go try it, test it, practice it, or fish it in the tournament. It doesn’t matter the pressure, you gotta go fish it.”