Follow the loons and find the lobsters – that would sum up Mike Iaconelli's Sunday game plan. Iaconelli believes loons are a better indicator than gulls for finding schools of blueback herring near the surface. He planned to run a series of pockets early looking for feeding loons that might lead him to some actively feeding bass.
"If you can get out there early and have 2, 3, 4 in your livewell, it's big," Iaconelli said at Saturday's weigh-in. "On a normal day, the cutoff time for that is 9 o'clock. It might extend another half-hour tomorrow because of the weather. It's all determined by the bait."
Then the grind begins: Making one or two casts on the key piece of structure in 50 to 60 brushpiles located 20 to 40 feet deep. Seriously, 50 to 60 in one day. He's got waypoints marked on all of them. That's what he's been doing this week.
Iaconelli found giant crawfish — in his word, "lobsters" — in the throats of bass he caught in pre-practice in December. By concentrating on the bass feeding on crawfish, he thinks the nomadic blueback herring are taken out of the equation once he starts working the brushpiles. If the bluebacks show up, they can "sweeten the deal," but he's not dependent on them.
However, it can be a long grind between bites. He went almost three hours Saturday before two "good ones" helped him to a limit weighing 16-9. Ike finished one bass short of a limit Friday.