Too much time on my hands

My job often takes me to different parts of the country. I do a lot of traveling by car. It usually isn't very long into a trip when my mind starts to wonder towards ham radio. That was the case the other day as I made my way home from Indiana.

I started thinking about my contesting efforts. I've never really taken a serious approach to contesting, at least not in the true sense of trying to rack up a decent score. I enjoy them for what they are and I plan to keep on participating, but I've generally used them for purposes other than trying to reach a high score. For instance, I'll try and nab new countries, which means that I'm often calling a single station for quite a while - sometimes a really long time depending on the pileup. Or I'll try and work all 50 states, paying more attention to prefixes and spots than working as many stations as I can. My approach generally depends on the contest, of course.

But as I drove, I began to wonder, if a person focused solely on racking up points, how good of a score can a 100 watt (or less) station achieve that uses search and pounce exclusively and also tries to keep multipliers in mind? I've tried to "run" before, and right now I will admit, I'm not very good at it. That's something I need to work on, but given my modest antennas and my power output, how realistic is it that I should even try to "run"? Perhaps later on in the longer contests it's reasonable to expect that I might be able to enjoy a couple of runs, but by and large I'm going to have to use search and pounce.

So the question popped into my mind, are really high scores possible using only search and pounce with modest equipment? And, of course, I'm talking about using only one radio. Are there any statistical evaluations of that? Has anyone compiled any tables comparing the two approaches? I'd be really curious to see some scores in major contests of folks who only use search and pounce exclusively.

I would have to think that operators who compete in the big contests using QRP have to use search and pounce very effectively unless they have an antenna farm that boggles the imagination. And I've seen some awfully good scores posted by some of the QRP ops.

Now, I'm sure if I spent more BIC (butt in chair) time, and tried to hone my own search and pounce skills, I could improve my scores without much difficulty - and I intend to do that. I know there's no 'smoking gun' or single piece of equipment that's going to substitute for actually getting in there and making QSO's. But I know that there have to be times where one can use search and pounce to their advantage. Such as late at night, when you often hear the big gun stations rattling off endless strings of CQ's, with few, if any, replies. It's those times where a person using search and pounce can still accumulate a respectable amount of points.

Anyone have any insight into this?