Tournament Pre-Fishing With Marcus Sycora

6mm – 10mm of the Osage, secondary points with brush, the presentation was slow.

I had the pleasure today to fish with successful tournament fisherman Marcus Sykora. Marcus invited me along to show me how he pre-fishes for a tournament, it was very enlightening for an average fisherman like me. To summarize my 3 hour adventure with Marcus, we fished and tried about every possible winter time patterns, fishing channel banks, channel swings, secondary points, main points, docks, brush piles, etc. What was so interesting to me was the surgical way the Marcus would seek out these varying structures, banks, cover, etc. He would idle into the area exploring his graph for fish, it is amazing how he can pick out 2-3 fish on his graph on a bank or wherever, to me, they looked like a few scattered dots on the side imaging. We would fish for those fish, if they did not bite, we were immediately onto another structure type. Once Marcus got bit on a specific structure/bank type, he immediately turned his attention to checking out similar style banks, not so much fishing the heck out of them, but more checking his electronics for fish. Today the baitfish was basically non existent on the 15 plus spots we fished, they seem to be deep. We mostly saw fish hanging on the bottom in groups of a few and we saw fish on brush piles. After several days of ice and boat being down, it felt good to be back on the water. While the bite is still tough, it was nice to see a bass hit the jerk bait. I caught one crappie on a jerk bait, believe me that bite felt really good :).