Tournament Calendar

and not always easy for Cod specialists, would be critical to success. I would make sure I had them locked away before targeting Cod because the last thing you want on the last day is to be needing to fill empty slots. Almost all of the competitors went in the opposite direction – targeting cod, while the winning team followed my thoughts and had their Goldens locked away in the first morning, freeing them up to focus on cod and upgrades for the remainder of the event. This left everyone else playing catch up and none came close.

Tactically I think mixed bag events are the most interesting and have a lot of potential for exciting events once the competitors work out how to approach them. I do think they cap out at two species but a three species/three bag combo in estuary would be interesting tactically. NZ FISHING COUNCIL

The New Zealand fishing Council have launched an online event that takes the mixed back concept to another level, though I prefer the TFA format for competitions.

In the New Zealand event, there is a list of species, ten in total that combine their common inshore and freshwater species. Their bag is made up of the largest of each of the ten species. While it’s feasible to get all ten, reality is bags of larger than six will be rare.

This is more in line with gamefishing thinking, I think it’s a cool series and worthy of inclusion as the multispecies skills have died back a bit with the move to monospecies events. The format is akin to the GameX format in Western Australia.

While I prefer the SCF approach, which has 20+ species each having their own category with two bags, I think that the bag system does lend itself to expanding the range of species included in events.

That said, I feel the points systems used by groups like the Ingham Rod and Reel Club and 4lb Club while more complex do the best job of all at single category multispecies. Combining multiple species into a single category is one area where a good points system excels as it provides options for how fishers want to build their totals and to be fair with both the Ingham and 4lb events they do include bag limits on species to encourage people to broaden their effort over bagging out.

At the category level, the mixed bag, largest of each species is probably the only multispecies bag format that will work. WHAT IS THE

RIGHT BAG SIZE?

I have been asked about bag sizes a lot and having looked at a range of datasets. Bottom line, for every fish you add to the maximum bag size, the more fishers you knock out. That effect is magnified for every day above one for the event.

Two bags increase participation –so long as competitors can access a species most people can get two fish. Two bags also increase the randomness of outcomes as the odd large fish can propel the fisher to the lead in an event they wouldn’t normally win. Two bags are used in the SCF events and Yakhunters events. Most times they are taken out by fishers who can find quality fish but of all the bag formats, two has thrown up the most unexpected results.

Three bags balance between participation and skill – good fishers can get three, the intermediate fishers most often won’t or if they do will do so with lower quality fish. Three bags bring the top 20% of fishers into the mix for most events.

Four and five bags reward best fishers – Even in a longer time series events like the Salmon Slam where each round was close to a fortnight it’s a challenge to get the four fish and an even larger challenge to get four quality fish. Every fish above four escalates that. At this level conditions are the most likely factor in sorting out the field. The level of random results is much less and having looked at the ABT as a long-term dataset, the top 5% of fishers are most likely to take out the event.