Hank Hears Hoofbeats
Cherry’s Classic Winning Strategy
When my dad was in medical school, the professors offered the students a simple lesson: “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”
In other words, when you get a clue, don’t look for the most exotic, most unlikely answer first. Focus your attention on the simplest, most likely cause. If you’re wrong, you can move on, but if you’re right, you’ve saved yourself a lot of time and effort.
As far as I know, Hank Cherry never went to medical school, but somewhere along the line he learned the lesson that simplicity often gets things done, especially in tournament fishing. While we agonize over custom paint jobs, long boat rides and precise GPS coordinates – sometimes appropriately, other times not so much – the tendency to overthink things hurts as many anglers as does the failure to find fish.
At Lake Guntersville, Cherry’s wire-to-wire win is a solid reminder that we should never overlook the following basic rules:
Go where the fish are
Prior to the tournament, several competitors told me that they hoped the tournament wouldn’t be won on a bridge. Guess what? It was won on a bridge. They let their preferences for how they wanted to win the tournament overwhelm their sneaking suspicions that it would be won a different way. Cherry primarily fished one of the most obvious structures in the lake, one very similar to the spot where Randy Howell won in 2014, and he caught the biggest bag of the entire tournament, along with two other solid limits.
Cast More
On Day Two, my photographer and I launched in Mud Creek, a 40 minute drive up the lake by boat, in order to watch Clent Davis (tied for 2nd after Day One) and several other competitors. They didn’t get it done. Davis got perhaps 20 strikes in the first half hour, put four keepers in the boat, and then never added another. Did he run out of fish or run out of time? We’ll never know, but if his spot had been closer to the ramp he might’ve had more time to explore other options. Meanwhile, Cherry burned hardly a thimbleful of gas and was on his best area for nearly 80 minutes more than Davis was on his. Ultimately, that probably didn’t make a difference, but if the key window on their respective spots a half hour before check-in, Hank would have been on his. Clent would’ve been fighting the waves on the main lake running back.
Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded
We all love to hear the stories of Randy Blaukat sinking his boat to get into a culvert to win at Buggs Island, or Roland taking a jet boat into the rapids on the Connecticut River for a win of his own, but show up at any Open and you’re likely to see bunches of competitors staking their claim on a hidden honey hole or a specialized boat and it’s rare that they win. For every Ott DeFoe who takes a tunnel hull up the river at Douglas, there are dozens who are also-rans at best. Sometimes the oddball strategy works, but at the highest levels of the sport, it’s usually a matter of who does conventional things the best.
Fish Your Strengths
Of the anglers in the top five, Cherry was the only one who relied on a jerkbait, the lure that’s become synonymous with his name. Could he have caught those same fish with a shallow diving crankbait (as Randy Howell did in 2014), a jig or a spinnerbait? Possibly, but he knows what he’s best at and he had confidence in it. It’s easy to get blown off your game by dock talk, and it takes courage to follow through with your convictions.
Supplement Your Strengths
While it takes true cojones to go out with only one rod on the deck, it takes brains to keep your options open. Cherry supplemented his jerkbait bite with a jig and a Jack Hammer. He also made full use of his electronics, noting that he saw many of the fish on his Garmin LiveScope. All too many of us have the technology on our boats but fail to utilize it to maximum effectiveness. The decision making process often becomes easier as you have more objective information in front of you.
If you’ve fished for any meaningful period of time, and especially if you’ve competed in tournaments, these lessons have been drilled into your head, but we all often disregard them. Start listening for hoofbeats and figure out which ones are which.
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