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One of the most skilled base games in Animal Crossing New Horizons is the Fishing Tourney, this mini game-esque event challenges even the most pro-Animal Crossing fishers. So in this guide, we will show how anyone including you can win the fishing tourney.
The fishing tourney takes place four times a year, one in each season and on the second Saturday of whichever month it's happening in. With this information we already know all the dates of the fishing tourneys through 2025.
The next fishing tourney happens to be this Saturday April 10th, which gives you plenty of time to prepare for the event to have the best shot at winning. On the day of the Tourney, Isabelle will talk about it in her morning announcement. If for some reason you don't have the fishing turning event happening on your island, you must upgrade resident services from a tent to a building and have some of your island decorated to unlock the event. You most likely need an island with a two to three star evaluation before the tarny can take place on your island. The basic premise of the event is that CJ the beaver who is the son of chip who appeared in previous Animal Crossing games visits your island and runs a fishing contest from 9 a.m to 6 p.m sharp. CJ will set up shop on your island's plaza starting at 5am, but you won't be able to compete until 9am. Throughout the whole day your villagers will dress up in their cute little fishing outfits and can be found fishing around your island, but they will not be competing against you in the tourney, so don't worry bluebear won't be stealing your fishes today. Your island will also play festive music during the duration of the tourney but will go back to regular music after 6 pm.
Now that you have all that information, it's time to enter the fishing tourney. All you need to do is talk to CJ in the plaza to get started. The rules are pretty simple: catch as many fish as possible in 3 minutes. This mechanic is in stark contrast to fishing events in previous Animal Crossing games that prioritize quality and size of fish over quantity, but in New Horizons the name of the game is speed.
The more fish you catch the more points you will receive, each fish you catch earns you one point but you also get two bonus points if you catch three or more fish.
You can also play with friends in this event, if you invite visitors to your island they can participate in the fishing tourney and everyone earns points together each player will also get up 10 bonus points depending on how many fish you catch as a team. This is a great way to earn more points much faster if you are grinding for exclusive prizes.
These prizes include:
Anchor Statue
Fish Door Plate
Fish Drying Rack
Fish Pachette
Fish Print
Fish Print Tee
Fish Rug
Fish Umbrella
Fish Wand
Fishing Rod Stand
Fresh Cooler
Marine Pop Wall
Tackle Bag
The anchor statue, fish door plate, fish print, drying rack, and fishing rod stand can all be customized using a DIY workbench and customization boxes. You can get these prizes by exchanging 10 points with CJ. The item you get will be random, so if you want to collect one of each item you will need to accumulate 130 points. You will not get duplicates of the prizes until you have received one of each prize, so you don't have to worry about missing out on a certain item. You can enter the tourney as many times as you'd like while the event is active, which should give you plenty of time nine hours to be exact to collect enough points.
We do want to note that CJ will not give you the option to exchange points for prizes until after you have emptied his cooler. There's a few more features of the cooler that we want to go over:
A sweet fishing trophy: a bronze, silver, and gold trophy are up for grabs if you get enough points at the tourney.
To collect these trophies you need to earn 100 points for bronze, 200 points for silver, and 300 points for gold.
All these points must be earned in one day, as points from previous fishing tourneys do not carry over. If your day rolls over or you time travel to a different day all your points will be lost as well, so keep that in mind. If you're playing with friends in multiplayer mode it could take up to an hour to get to 100 points.
Here we will go over some ways to get points faster even if you're playing in solo mode:
Tip 1 - Prepare Enough Fishing Rods In Your Pockets
Before you start the round make sure to have some fishing rods in your pockets. We recommend at least having two fishing rods in your pockets for each round, since a rod could break mid-game. You can buy a fishing rod from Nook's Cranny or even craft one. Pro tip: if you only have a few fishing rods and you're worried they may break on you, you can reset their life span easily. The normal fishing rod, fish fishing rod, colorful fishing rod and outdoor z fishing rod can have their uses reset to zero by using a customization box to change its color.
For some reason, this makes the Animal Crossing tool new again and won't break as fast. You can buy the customization boxes in Nook's Cranny for 600 Animal Crossing bells.
Tip 2 - Use The Cooler To Stock Your Fish
It costs 500 bells to participate, but CJ will waive the fee for the first round. This fee is also waived every time you're playing in multiplayer mode, so if you want to save some bells grab a friend to play with. You will also notice a large cooler underneath the tent in the plaza, when you catch fish during the three minutes of the tourney, they will all magically get transported into this cooler. At the end of the round, you can either sell the fish to CJ who totally isn't going to eat them or anything, or take them out if you want to keep them. If you're looking to make some extra bells, CJ does a payout of 150 of the normal fish sell price. The best part about the cooler is that you don't need to worry about your pockets filling up with fish, you will always have enough room to catch as many fish as possible. It's also important to note that in order to play more rounds, you'll need to take all the fish out of the cooler manually or sell them to CJ.
Tip 3 - Slow Down To Walk When You Approach A Body Of Water
When you start the game CJ will put three minutes on the clock then you need to run as quickly as possible from your plaza to a body of water, this can be your ocean, rivers or ponds as they all spawn fish. Once you approach a body of water, slow down to walk because running can scare off the fish and waste valuable time.
Tip 4 - Get Your Aim More Accurate
In order to catch as many fish as possible, you need to be accurate. Fish will start to nibble on your fishing rod bopper once they see it. In order for the fish to see your bopper you want to align yourself, so you're facing the fish head on, that way when you cast your line, the bopper will ideally land right in front of the fish and they will swim to it. If you are off even by a little bit, the fish will not see your bopper immediately and may swim around for a bit before noticing it. This is fine for normal fishing, but it's not good for a timed event like this one. You can practice getting your aim more accurate before the day of the tourney or before starting the round, so there's less pressure.
Tip 5 - Accurately and Quickly Put Away the Hook
Once a fish has noticed your bopper and swims to it, you will need to watch the bopper to see when it goes under water. This can be a little tricky as the fish may pull the bopper under on the first, second, third or even fourth time in nibbles on the bopper. If watching the bopper is causing you too much trouble, it is much easier to turn up the game sound and listen for when the bopper is pulled under water. There is an audible plop sound which sounds like "plop", and is much easier to hear than just relying on sight. Then all you need to do is press A to catch your fish. If you spam the B button, you can exit the catching fish sequence faster so you don't waste any precious time and get back to fishing.
It can take up to 10 seconds to catch a fish for even the most skilled players, so you will want to save as much time as possible. If you're using a Nintendo pro controller or joy-con they will vibrate when the fish nibbles or pulls the bopper underwater. This is an additional way that can help you reel in more fish.
Tip 6 - Avoid Bunny Day's Interference
We also want to note that things other than fish can spawn during the fishing tourney including trash and water eggs if the tarny happens to overlap with the bunny day season. This is super annoying and just something to be aware of, especially if you're trying to grind for points. If this is bugging you, we recommend time traveling to a fishing tourney in a different season since we all know the dates for the next few years. If the timer is almost up and you're in the middle of catching a fish, you will not get a point unless the fish is in your hand and you're showing it off when the timer is up, so you'll want to be a speedy fisher and make every fish count.
Tip 7 - Use The Two Tricks To Optimize Your Time
You may be wondering how can you optimize your time so you can get those irresistible fish points and also avoid catching trash and water eggs. Well, we have two methods that can shave off minutes of wasted time during each round and can guarantee you will only catch fish:
1) Use Fish Bait To Make Fish Spawn Faster
The first big time waster is just looking for fish to catch. Fish spawn periodically which is fine if you're doing some leisure fishing, but the fishing tourney goes hardcore. An easy way to force fish to spawn is to use fish bait and no it's not considered cheating. If you're unfamiliar with fishbait, it's an item you throw into the water which automatically spawns a fish in front of you. Bait is made from vanilla clams which are found by digging into the sand on your beaches, you will know where to dig when you see a little dark circle appear on your beach which is then followed by a small bit of water that spurts out of the sand, then all you have to do is dig up the area with a shovel to get a manila clam. You then take all the clams to any DIY workbench and craft into fish bait. If you don't have the fish bait recipe yet, you will automatically learn it the first time you dig up a manila clam.
We recommend digging up a whole bunch of manila clams before the day of the tourney and craft them all into bait, so you're ready to go when the day of the tourney arrives. Now all you need to do during the tourney is stand somewhere with easy water access and throw the bait into the water, fish will spawn each time you throw bait in the water making it much faster to catch the fish. This method completely eliminates the need to run around looking for fish, so you can spend less time running and more time earning lots of points.
2) Terraform Body of Water Near To Plaza
If you already unlocked terraforming which you get when you unlock K.K slider, then you can bring the water to you. Since you must start each round of the fishing tourney by talking to CJ in the plaza, you waste valuable time by running to a body of water. But with terraforming, you can just build a body of water right next to the plaza, this is super helpful because it saves time running from the plaza to the water in order to fish. You can then combine this trick with the fish bait trick to become the ultimate fishing tourney pro. If you're going to build a pond or river near a plaza, ensure it's large enough for fish to spawn. You can check this by attempting to throw fish bait into the water, if it won't let you, the body of water is too small for fish to spawn, this is super easy to fix by just expanding the size of the body of water with the water shovel. Once the size is big enough the game will let you throw fishbait in and a fish will spawn, now you have an easily accessible place to fish that is super close to the plaza.
Hopefully with all these tips, you can earn all the points you want and get those exclusive fish prizes and trophies. If you're not available to participate in the fishing tourneys on the dates they occur, you can always time travel to the specific dates to access the event again. If you want to play the fishing tourney over multiple days, you can keep your Switches system time on the specific day for as long as you want so you can continue to play the event for as long as you like.
