Pros Diverge On Whether Rules Are Effective, Enforceable

(Editor's note: This is part 1 of a 2-part story on tour-level no-information rules.)

Figure things out for yourself or seek the counsel of others – that's a dilemma that confronts all of us on a regular basis. It occurs each time we find ourselves facing a situation for which we know we don't have every last shred of information that could help us make the right choice from among several (or many) options.

It's a quandary that professional anglers are forced to deal with constantly. Some take the view that the more information they can obtain about a particular tournament venue, the better off they'll be. Others are just the opposite – they're convinced that any intel they're likely to get will be faulty at least as often as it's fruitful, and they'd prefer to rely primarily on their own skills and instincts to locate fish and make the necessary day-by-day adjustments to catch them. And still others, of course, fall somewhere in between.

No matter which camp they're in, they've all come to accept one indisputable fact: In this wireless age, it's far easier to acquire the latest information about a lake and the bass that swim in it than ever before. That technology and the communication devices it's spawned are here to stay, and the companies that produce them have become an important part of the industry.

So just how much of a role does advance information (including the acquisition of GPS waypoints) gleaned from outside sources play in the outcome of tour-level events? According to some pros, the impact is significant. Others, however, say it's far less than what the average BassFan might think.

And how many of those info exchanges with locals occur within the off-limits and no-info periods (roughly 2 weeks on the FLW Tour and a month on the Bassmaster Elite Series) prior to the events – a practice that constitutes cheating? Again, opinions vary.

And what's more, there's no clear consensus on how to stop anyone who violates that rule. In fact, some think that catching the perpetrators is all but impossible.

A Matter of Professionalism

Many of the top Bassmaster Elite Series anglers think the 30-day rule is one of the key factors that makes their circuit the most professional in the history of the sport, and some of their counterparts on the FLW side welcomed the similar (albeit shorter) restriction that was instituted last year.

"I love the rule," said reigning Bassmaster Classic champion and 2007 Elite Series Angler of the Year (AOY) Skeet Reese. "It creates the most fair, competitive field that this sport has ever had, and I pride myself on being a professional angler. I'm not saying I've never gotten any help (within the rules); I have, but I also have enough confidence in my abilities to get the job done on my own.

"I'm not saying it's perfect, but if we threw out those rules, there'd be nothing professional about that. It'd be like a street brawl."

Jay Yelas, a three-time tour-level AOY and 2002 Classic champ who now fishes FLW exclusively, agreed.

"Yeah, it would hurt the integrity of the sport if they did that," he said. "The reason those rules are in place is it makes it more competitive from a sporting perspective – it lets the tournaments be decided by the most skilled anglers and not who hired a bunch of guides to give them a bunch of waypoints the day before it started.

"The information you can get prior to the off-limits is vague and general for the most part. It may help in a broad sense, but it's usually not that big of a factor. It'll give you a few places to go and check out, but the fish may or may not be there."

More Fair the Other Way?

Reese and Yelas said they both rely on the integrity of the vast majority of their fellow competitors to stay within the rules regarding the gathering of information. Other pros aren't so trusting, and some say the field would be more level if the rules were eliminated.

"I don't have a problem with the guys who do it in pre-practice because that isn't against the rules," said Ish Monroe, who'll fish both major circuits this year. "The ones that worry me are the guys getting waypoints during the off-limits. I can't prove anybody's doing it, but it makes you wonder when guys show up on the first day of practice and they're so dialed in that it's scary.

"It's huge on big lakes with deep offshore structure like Kentucky Lake – the guys who get waypoints are at a big advantage. They talk about how every spot they hit they caught 25 pounds off of. I go out and fish 10 spots I found on my maps and my Lowrance (depthfinder), and maybe one of those pays off.

"If you left it open," he continued, "then everybody who's doing it would have to adjust to a new game. Everybody could get help and information and take it for whatever it was worth."

Mark Davis doesn't believe that waypoint-gathering during off-limits is prevalent, but he's convinced that it does occur. He gave an example from 2008, when an Elite event that was scheduled for the Mississippi River was moved to Old Hickory due to severe flooding in Iowa. The announcement of the move came just 2 weeks prior to the tournament.

"I get over there (for practice) and I certainly don't know anything about Old Hickory, so I'm out looking for fish offshore early on the first day. I fished a stretch of river ledge that was at least a mile long, cranking and throwing a jig, and along that whole stretch I found two schools of bass. Now if they'd been on very obvious places, like a cut or a point or a high spot, that would've been one thing. But they were on nothing significant – they just happened to be where they were.

"I continued to search that river ledge and when I was probably a quarter-mile farther down, I watched a guy in our tournament pull right up on that second school I'd found, put his trolling motor down and get himself in position, and then make a cast and catch one. Then he makes a second cast and catches another one, and then pulls his trolling motor up and idles right over to the next school.

"He caught a couple of fish there, and then cranked up his big engine and left. Now, he had to have gotten that info during the off-limits. What took me several hours to accomplish, he did in 5 minutes, so I know there's some stuff going on."

– End of part 1 (of 2) –