FOR as long as Mark Crompton can remember he has loved fishing and had a line in the water from day dot.

"It has definitely been in the blood for a long time,” he said.

Mark grew up on the southern highlands of NSW and as a younger man fished around Nowra and St Georges Basin.

"Then it spread to the whole east coast of NSW and now it's Queensland to Tasmania,” he said.

"Wherever the tournaments go we will go. My wife and I travel together. Even though you are fishing by yourself a lot of the time it's a team sport.”

Traditionally an attribute of patience would be considered an asset when trying to catch fish but Mark said nowadays he believed the opposite to be true.

"In actual fact the people who get into this style of fishing are the people who are impatient because you are chasing the fish,” he said.

"You are not sitting there with bait, you are going out and hunting fish.”

Mark said modern lure-style fishing was very different to the traditional method of bait and sinker.

"There is so much more that comes into it. When you really start to pay attention to what species you are actually chasing there is a lot of lines that join up. You learn over the years and only time on the water will teach you that.”

Fellow competitor Kris Hickson said different anglers approached the same problem in different ways.

"Dean fished up here a few weeks ago and he came out with two rods, normally we would come out with a full kit but he was pretty confident that the two lures he tied on were the ones he was going to use,” he said.

"Ross would have had about 10. He is like me, one of everything just in case. Roll through them and when it's tough use everything until you find something to bite on and then when you know you should be catching them go back to what you know works.

"It plays with your mind because you are thinking 'what if this works, what if that works'. It's not until you are actually connected that your confidence comes.”