Brandon Lester catches his share of freshwater drum from the smallmouth-fish waters of the Tennessee River. Just now, what he thought was a drum became a big, fat smallmouth. And with that, another cull. That fish weighed over four pounds, and now there are three fish of that size in his livewell. Lester is now an early contender to be fishing on Championship Tuesday.
He’s got the BASSTrakk lead now with 17 pounds. All he needs to do is cull out the smallmouth weighing 1-8 and 2-4 to reach the 20-pound mark that was predicted as the daily benchmark for winning the tournament.