Ish’s Ikeechobee Weight Not Off the Charts

[Not sure if this was published on Bassmaster.com or not, so we’re running it here.]

by Jay Kumar

When Mark Zona was at the Okeechobee Elite Series event, he asked me what I felt the winning weight would be based on BassGold.com data. He wasn’t just a little curious – he was super curious because he was pretty amazed that BassGold’s data accurately predicted the winning weights and patterns for the Classic and the St. Johns River Elite Series event.

I told him the data showed that the winner would average about 20 pounds a day, or around 80 pounds.

At this point we all know that was true for everyone in the top five but Ish Monroe, whose 108-05 works out to about 27 pounds a day. Chris Lane’s 95-09 was around 24 pounds a day, sort of borderline. The rest of the top five were right around that 20-pound mark.

Even though BassGold isn’t a prediction tool – it’s a patterning tool – it still can function as a prediction tool in that it can help you formulate a pattern or patterns (and winning or placing weight) based on historical pattern information. And as these tournaments have shown, it works.

Because it works, there had to be a reason why Monroe’s 27-pound average was so far above what I thought the data showed. So I went and took a look at the “Weights By Month” graph again in an Okeechobee “Pattern Report” in BassGold, and look what I found:

Click to see this bigger.

That graph shows actual tournament weights averaged per day so the data is apples-to-apples among different levels of tournaments. While it clearly shows a cluster of weights in the low 20s per day, the two points called out show that while Monroe’s weight was big, it wasn’t off-the-charts big. (By the way, in BassGold you can move your mouse over the points to get the date and weight – we just can’t show that in a screen capture.)

This is a great example of the “levels” of “gold” in BassGold. The first level is the gold that’s right there – like the weight graph. It shows you a lot.

The second level is what you as a bass angler bring to it. In other words, the fishing experience and knowledge you have enables you to see more or different gold in BassGold.

In this case I wasn’t at Okeechobee and the practice reports weren’t in yet when I said 20 pounds a day. So I just looked at the mass of points above. Would Zona have seen things differently since he was down there and is a far better fisherman than I am? Would he have predicted 25 or so pounds per day to win using his knowledge and experience reading the graph? I don’t know, but I’d guess yes.

Category: BASS, Elite Series, FL