Editor’s Note: Rick Clunn of Ava, Missouri, has been a bass pro for 46 years, has won four Bassmaster Classics, has been Angler of the Year and has earned about $3 million in tournament bassing. Twenty five of today’s bass-fishing professional name Clunn as the man most admired in bass fishing. “When I asked longtime legendary angler Rick Clunn what was the biggest change he’d seen in tournament bass fishing, he answered, ‘It’s the influx of high school and college tournament fishermen,’” John E. Phillips, outdoor writer, says. “Clunn explained that, ’I guess the reason that’s such a big deal is because I never saw that trend coming.’” Part of this week’s information is from an interview with Clunn.

I’ve always been an intuitive fisherman. I teach bass fishing at a lot of colleges, and one question I’m often asked is, “How do you know when to leave an area and look for bass in another spot?” I can’t really say, as I once did, “Your intuition.” So, the term I use is, “Listen to your gut.” Most of us don’t really know what intuition means, or where the term comes from, so we use the phrase, “Trust your gut.” What allows an angler to trust his gut is the confidence he’s built-up over years of trusting those intuitive thoughts. The results are fishing well or winning a tournament.

Intuition is a phenomenon that I’m pretty sure most people don’t understand. When people asked Albert Einstein about some of the theories and inventions he created, and where the ideas had come from, he’d say, “I don’t know, but I do know it didn’t come from my rational mind.” Later in life, Einstein explained that, “The most-important part of my mind is my intuition and my imagination. That’s the gift. My intellect is a faithful servant.” When I first started talking about trusting your gut or using your intellect, many of the other tournament fishermen thought I was from outer space.

John E. Phillips: Rick, when you first started talking about trusting your gut (using your intuition), most people thought you were from outer space. However, in recent years, more and more tournaments have been won by anglers who have trusted their intuition, rather than by anglers who didn’t.

Rick Clunn: That idea’s still not mainstream. An old saying is, “If you’re going to pray like hell because you believe that everything comes from God, you better be willing to work like hell because everything depends on you.” One of the most-important things a writer ever told me was in the 1980s after I had won the Bassmaster Classic; he said, “I need to do an article on the structure fishing technique.” I said, “Wait a minute, I’m not an expert on that. Roland Martin is; you really need to call Roland if you want to get some good info on structure fishing.” I never will forget what the writer told me: “No, no, no, everything that has been written about Roland and structure fishing has been written.” That hit me really hard, and I thought, “I will never let anyone read my last chapter.”

Looking for more content? Check out our YouTube channel and watch Mark Davis – How to Find Bass Before a Tournament by John E. Phillips.

Expert Guidebooks on Bass Fishing: Best Sellers

If you want to become the best you can be, find someone who’s already become the best at what you want to do and follow his or her instructions. This is what I’ve done in my new book, Bass Pros’ Season by Season Tactics.

In this book, I’ve chosen some of the best bass fishermen to give you advice on how to find and catch bass during each period of a bass fish’s life, including professionals like Kevin VanDam, Denny Brauer, David Fritts, Rick Clunn, Larry Nixon, George Cochran, Mark Davis, Woo Daves, Gary Klein, Davy Hite, Michael Iaconelli, Skeet Reese, Mark Rose, and Shaw Grigsby.

My hope is that this book will help you find and catch more bass at every time of the year and each day you’re on the water. The men included in this book are some of the best mentors I know of for successful bass fishing anywhere in the nation.

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How to Bass Fish Like a Pro
If you could sit down and interview some of the best pro bass fishermen in the world, what would you want them to tell you to help you improve your bass fishing skills?

In this book, How to Bass Fish Like a Pro, Kevin VanDam explains how he catches bass consistently, and how he fishes all 12 months of the year. In the bonus chapters, he will tell you how to fish for hot-weather bass.

Denny Brauer will tell you the ways he hates to fish, how he picks the best fishing lures for different water and weather conditions, and will give you his best fishing tips for hot weather. In Brauer’s bonus chapters, he’ll teach you when to flip a jig, a tube, or a creature bait and tell you his three tips for how to be a better fisherman.

Mark Davis, in Chapter 3 of the book, explains his five secrets to becoming a better bass fisherman, how to turn your bass fishing around to the positive side, and how to catch hot-weather bass. In the bonus chapter, you’ll get six different interviews with Davis, where he tells you: three tips for becoming a better bass fisherman; his three favorite bass lures; and how to keep a big bass on the line and get it to the boat.

James Niggemeyer tells you how to become a bass pro. He also tells you how to catch bass when the weather sizzles. In Niggemeyer’s bonus chapter, he explains how to move from being a bass-club fisherman up to being a pro.

Mark Rose will explain his five favorite go-to bass lures, and how to catch bass in the middle of the summer.

In this book, you’ll hear from top-performing pro fishermen about how they catch big bass consistently, and what they do to win millions of dollars as professional bass fishermen.

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Catch the Biggest and Most Bass in Any Lake
If you were having open-heart surgery at the hospital, you’d want the best doctor with the most experience and the latest equipment and techniques that money could buy to do your operation. You’d study these doctors’ credentials to learn who was the best.

This is the same type of research that author John E. Phillips has done with the best bass fishermen in the nation to solve the problem of how to find and catch the biggest and the most bass in any body of water that he fishes.

This is the same type of research that author John E. Phillips has done with the best bass fishermen in the nation to solve the problem of how to find and catch the biggest and the most bass in any body of water that he fishes.

In this book, you’ll hear about the techniques, tips, baits, lures, and tackle that 18 of the nation’s best professional fishermen use to support their families by winning bass tournaments and catching the most and the biggest bass they can in every tournament they fish.

Most of these anglers are Bassmaster Classic winners, Megabucks winners, Angler-of-the-Year and FLW Tour winners – like Rick Clunn, Kevin VanDam, George Cochran, Mark Davis, Paul Elias, Skeet Reese, Larry Nixon, Hank Parker, Ken Cook, Denny Brauer, Alton Jones, and Jay Yelas.

Also, every serious bass fisherman should know Timmy Horton, Mark Rose, Randy Dearman, Harold Allen, Mike Wurm, and Shaw Grigsby, men whose tactics you’ll find in this book. To learn how to fish for bass and change your bass-fishing trips from fishing trips to catching trips, this book is a must-have.

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Winning Strategies of the Bass Pros
I learned many years ago if you want to be the best you can be, then you need to learn from the best – particularly when you want to be the best bass fisherman possible. That’s why I’ve written Winning Strategies of the Bass Pros about 11 top bassers.

If you’re wondering at what age you can start learning about bass fishing, you’ll see in the first two chapters about two young men who have come up through the ranks of collegiate bass tournaments – Jordan Lee, who won the Bassmaster Classic in 2017, and Dustin Connell, who won $100,000 in a B.A.S.S. Elite Series tournament in Mississippi in 2017. Top-name pros on both the B.A.S.S. circuit and the FLW circuit are in this book, including Kevin VanDam, Jay Yelas, George Cochran, Rick Clunn, Larry Nixon, Woo Daves, Randy Howell, Scott Canterbury, and Gary Klein.

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In How to Bass Fish Like a Pro, Volume II, you’ll learn tips and tactics from 21+ Bassmaster Classic winners, two Major League Fishing champions, and 20+ Bassmaster Anglers of the Year about some of the dramatic changes in bass fishing, like:

Depth Finders: You need the latest and greatest depth finders available, since they’re the brains of a bass boat with maps, GPS, side scanning, down scanning, and forward scanning features that enable you to see underwater structures and fish 100-feet away with a 360-degree view. Today’s competitive bass anglers may have four or five depth finders located on the consoles and the bows of their boats. 

Other Changes in Equipment: Power fishing for bass using heavy line and rods, big baits, and bait-casting reels that resemble winches have given way to finesse fishing and new techniques like fishing the Ned Rig, the Neko Rig, the Chicken Rig, and the Tokyo Rig on spinning tackle and line as small as 6-10 pounds. 

The Growth in Youth and College Competitions for Bass: A young person can begin competition fishing as early as the second grade and continue throughout high school. After that, if the competitor qualifies, he/she may win a scholarship to fish on a college team that eventually may lead them to a professional bass-fishing career. 

Changes in the Ways Anglers Bass Fish: Many of the most-consistent winners never pick-up their rods to fish during pre-fishing. Instead, they’ll idle across the water, dropping waypoints from their electronics in places where they’ve identified schools of bass holding. These contestants will have at least 50-250 locations, where they’ve pinpointed schools of bass before a tournament starts.

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Tomorrow: Young Basser Hayden Marbut and Forward-Facing Sonar