The first event of the 2022 MLF Pro Circuit season is officially in the books and my fourth year on the circuit is officially underway. Finishing 55th at Sam Rayburn Reservoir and cashing my first check of the year, the tournament could have been much worse, but I can’t help but reminisce on mistakes made and what could have been.

Go To 'The Juice'

After the two days of official practice, I felt conflicted. On one hand, I had found a few areas and patterns and had caught several good fish – including a 10-pound behemoth – but on the other hand, very few of those areas and patterns felt like they would be worth revisiting during the competition days.

The high-water mark of my practice came in the last hour of the final day, when I found a shallow-water area with some cypress trees and relatively deep water compared to the rest of the bay. I ended up getting about 16 pounds worth of bites in short order, and it involved flipping and running ChatterBaits by shallow cover, so I was in heaven.

This area was a large, shallow bay that dead-ended into a canal, and looking at my Navionics maps I could see there was a stretch that I didn’t feel like I needed to practice on, but knew it was likely “the juice.” I figured I would just fish it in the tournament. It was a spot that had three creeks running into it and with the low-water conditions, it had massive potential.

Knowing the quality of fish in that bay, I went into the first day of the event feeling excited about the area. The only thing I worried about was someone else getting there before I did due to it being a smaller area.

Blasting off for the first day, I made the 10-minute run to find I was indeed the first one in the bay. Relieved that I was the sole angler in the backwater, I had two options – start toward the mouth where I began getting bites in practice or make my way to the back of the slough where I felt “the juice” was. I ended up choosing the former – a decision that would change the trajectory of the event for me.

As I worked my way toward the back of the bay, the hum of another competitor's engine grew louder into a guttural growl, until his boat rounded the point a few hundred feet away. I knew immediately I had made a grave mistake, and I watched in disappointment as he went straight to the back.

With the other angler claiming the juice, and me only having one small keeper to show for my poor decision-making, under my breath I recited a truth I thought I knew all too well – "always go straight to the juice."

After realizing that I had ceded what I considered my best spot due to poor decision-making, the rest of the event ended up hinging primarily on one prespawn staging point that I combed with a Carolina rig. It certainly wasn’t an exciting pattern, but it was getting bites.

With the event starting to take on the flavor of a terrible finish, and with very little confidence in the prospects of blindly running a new pattern, I put all my eggs in that one basket. Fortunately, I was able to catch just enough on that point in two days to cash a $10,000 check and capture decent points.

Could Have Been Worse

After the event, I spent a few extra days on Rayburn doing some filming for my Sweetwater TV show, which certainly highlighted how well I could have done had I made a better decision in the first hour of the tournament. Revisiting the backwater again, and hitting the juice was particularly frustrating as I found a huge group of fish that could have made the tournament seem easy instead of the grind that it became.

My feelings of disappointment were met with conflicting feelings of relief as well because though I had an opportunity to do very well, it also had all the markers for a triple-digit finish. After those initial mistakes, I could’ve easily succumbed to overthinking things, but instead I made the decision to dig in like a tick on that one point, where I knew there were fish, and ended up grinding it out to a decent finish and a quality check.

In the handful of years I've fished the Pro Circuit, I've had a couple of very poor finishes every year, which have kept me out of the Top 10 in points. Most of those events all had the potential for stellar finishes, but I ended up falling flat on my face due to overthinking things and not recognizing when I needed to switch gears.

Sure, I feel I could have done better, but part of the season-long endeavor of fishing for points and making championships is recognizing when you need to go into conservative mode. In years past, I don’t think I've made that switch quickly enough, which in many cases has resulted in my worst finishes.

In the end, Rayburn turned out to be a tournament to survive, and I feel like I did that, and I left with two very important lessons – always go straight to the juice and know when to fish conservatively.

I hope to keep these lessons in mind during the events on the remainder of the schedule and hopefully I can use them to keep my worst finishes from being all that bad.

(Miles "Sonar" Burghoff is an MLF Pro Circuit competitor and the co-host of the TV series "Sweetwater." To visit his website, click here. You can also visit him on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (SonarFishing) and Instagram (@sonarfishing).