Jason Christie has three Elite Series titles and a 2017 runner-up finish in the Angler of the Year race. He’s been successful on a wide variety of fisheries. His wins came at Bull Shoals Lake, Lake Dardanelle and Lake St. Clair. But the Sabine River has long been a thorn in his side. His previous finishes here have been progressively worse: 69th in 2013, 82nd in 2015 and 94th in 2018.
“The Sabine is not in my wheelhouse,” Christie said at yesterday’s weigh-in. “I think I weighed more fish today than the three past Elite events first day weights combined.”
He wasn’t far off on that guess. His Day 1 second-place weight yesterday was 15-1. His previous three Sabine Day 1 weights combined were 15-7. And if his BassTrakk two-day total today is close to the 26-7 showing now, he will have surpassed in two days his total weight for six days in the previous three Sabine tournaments – 24-6.
“I could not catch a bass (Friday) and I’m going to drive home happy,” Christie said Thursday. “This place has my number.”
Obviously, Christie isn’t going home anytime soon. He’s caught 11 bass today, according to BassTrakk. Christie is making a long run up the Sabine River, where his biggest problem is having enough fuel to make it there and back. He’s got “seven or eight rods on the deck” but very little tackle or extra gear in his boat in order to save every ounce of fuel possible.
“Every backwater is different,” Christie said about all the rods on deck. “You may have a cypress tree. You may have a laydown. You may have a cut bank. Every one of those needs a different bait.”