There are few names more woven into American bass fishing than Roland Martin, and on a hot, shallow Lake Okeechobee practice day he was doing what he has done for half a century: eliminating water. Fishing alongside his granddaughter Hilary, of the channel TheReelHilarySue, Martin was scouting for a $10,000 one-day team tournament in which the pair would compete the next morning, against, among others, Hilary's father, the tournament pro Scott Martin.
The early bite revolved around the shad spawn. In water barely two and a half feet deep, Hilary explained, baitfish push shallow at night and stack against grassy edges, creating a brief, frantic window. "This first hour and a half is critical," she said, throwing a big walking topwater while Martin worked a frog through the reeds. But the area that had been "just heaven" a month earlier, as he put it, produced nothing.
That blank, Martin argued, was the whole value of practice. "That's the good thing about practice. You eliminate a lot of bad water," he said. "The fact that we didn't catch any fish isn't that bad." His mistake, he admitted, had been to lean on memory. "What I would have done is I would have gone over to where I'd caught them last month, and that was the wrong move, because that's where we tried today." On a lake he pegged at roughly three-quarters of a million acres, the answer was simple and humbling: keep moving. "This is a big, big lake, and we just have to find another area."
The day turned in the afternoon, on a swim jig, when Martin set into a fish that immediately changed the mood in the boat. "Keep them pinned, real big," he urged, before sliding a bass of four and a half to five pounds aboard. A second followed, then more, all from a stretch he had fished the previous year. That pattern crystallised the lesson he wanted Hilary to take into the tournament. "You catch one five-pounder, and that makes up for the three that you spend an hour and a half to try to catch schooling," he said. "So why not just catch one five-pounder instead of three or four little ones?"
Martin's instinct for finding fish in featureless water drew a wry tribute from his granddaughter. As he pulled keepers from open flats, she laughed that he "just finds water and just catches five-pounders," adding, "it's how Roland Martin does it." He also reached back into his own history, recalling a May tournament with Scott. "One time I was with your dad in a tournament this time of year in May, and I caught two seven-pounders back to back on this Devil's Horse," he said. "Put us in second place."
Hilary tempered expectations for the event itself. Okeechobee is capable of producing 30-pound bags, and she expected someone would find them, but she did not anticipate a wholesale slugfest. "If we have a solid 20-pound bag tomorrow, I think we're looking pretty good," she said. The stakes, and the sentiment, were clear. "It's a $10,000 tournament, a nice payout," she said. "So it would be nice to win, especially [for] my grandpa."
By day's end they had a swim-jig pattern, a couple of promising zones and a plan built around quality over quantity, exactly the kind of edge a practice day is supposed to buy.