During the two-day delay before this tournament began, several Elite Series anglers, unprompted, predicted this would be a feast-or-famine tournament. Experience told them that with no practice time on a drastically changed Pickwick Lake since official practice ended on Wednesday, everybody would be playing a guessing game Saturday. And a bunch of those guesses would be wrong.
That’s exactly how it played out. The headlines were Koby Kreiger’s 25 3/4-pound limit and five other bags over 20 pounds. But the haves and the have-nots practically divided the field in half. Fifty-one anglers in the 100-man field caught five-bass limits Saturday. And with very few exceptions, if you caught a limit, you’re in the top 50 going into Day 2, after which the field will be cut in half for Day 3.
The only angler in the top 50 who didn’t weigh five bass was Robbie Latuso, who’s four totaling 13-8 put him in 44th place. Two guys caught limits and didn’t make the top 50. K.J. Queen was 52nd with 12-8, and Rick Clunn was 55th with 11-9.
John Cox was the primary example of the have-nots. Cox finished third in the previous Elite Series event on the Tennessee River in Knoxville on Feb. 28th, and followed that with a $100,000 victory in an MLF tournament on Alabama’s Smith Lake last Sunday. The hottest bass tournament angler on the planet weighed one keeper yesterday – a 3-pound, 9-ounce spotted bass, which left him in 87th place.