If Patrick Walters could have repeated Sunday’s 22-pound, 15-ounce big bag of the tournament so far, he would be atop the BASSTrakk leaderboard today. But at 11:45, it shows him with four bass totaling 3-10. And, more importantly, Walters is out of time.
The second-year Elite Series pro from Summerville, S.C., made the long run south to Mud Lake again today, but it’s a two-hour ride. With a 1:45 p.m. check-in time today, Walters has to be on the move.
It’s worth recounting how he caught them yesterday, in 8 to 12 inches of water. “I didn’t go there Saturday because I didn’t think I could get back in there, the water had dropped so much,” he said.f
After he got there Sunday, he turned his graphs off and “dragged the dirt. It felt good to get back to my roots,” Walters said. “It’s the shallowest I’ve caught them in a while.”
Walters wasn’t looking at bass on spawning beds. His first fish, weighing 7-15, came on a long blind cast with weightless Zoom Fluke in watermelon magic color. His other four keepers came on a Zoom Ultra Vibe Speed Craw flipped in a mat on 65-pound test braided line with a 3/4-ounce weight.
“There were a couple of mats in there and they were tucked into those mats,” Walters said. “I didn’t see a single one of them.”