Steve Bowman had a critical lapse in judgement today that severely impacted our ability to cover this tournament. He brought a banana in the boat. A real angler would know bananas bring bad luck on the water. And sure enough we had a series of issues.
It started at 10:00. We had been covering the 3 Amigos (Kevin VanDam, Russ Lane and Jeff Kriet), when they decided to break up and go their separate ways. At the time each had just one fish in their livewell. We decided to give up on them and seek out more action.
Matt Herren had risen to the top of the BASStrakk leaderboard so we went in search of him. When we found him we also found our crew of Chris Mitchell and Craig Lamb already covering him. So we weren't needed there. In fact those boys accused us of poaching. Departing that situation with our tail between our legs we learned Russ Lane, the angler we left, had just caught a 7 pounder and we had missed covering that action. We raced back to catch up with him. But when we got back to Russ there was no more action to be had. We hung out with him for another dry spell, then headed out to check on KVD. While we had been away from him KVD had caught a limit, we had missed all of that action too except for his one early fish. The banana had cast it's spell on us.
To top it off I wrote up this story three hours ago, sent it to our web producers, and somehow it got lost in the internet. I had to write the whole thing again. At that point I begged Bowman to eat the banana. He finally did. Thanks a lot buddy!
Originally published Saturday of BASSfest.