The practice period for any tournament reveals clues of what’s to be when competition begins. But they’re only hints. No one spends time hammering on a potential hot spot in practice. And every day is different, sometimes dramatically so, on the water.
But here are a few clues the anglers offered on the eve of the Bass Pro Shops Bassmaster Opens Championship at Table Rock Lake:
1. Fifteen-inch bass aren’t easy to catch. Wesley Strader predicted half the 28-pro angler field will weigh-in without a five-bass limit today. Remember, there’s a 15-inch minimum length limit on all three species of black bass in Table Rock.
“It’s a lot harder to catch a limit than I thought it would be,” said Patrick Walters. “You can catch a ton of 14-inch fish. If the length limit was 12 inches, everybody would have a limit in the first 30 minutes. You can go to a spot and catch 50 and only one will be 15 inches. That’s what’s aggravating. You’ve got to optimize your time.”
2. Expect the winning weight to be about 40 pounds. “And that will be hard to do here,” said Strader. With daily ups and downs, if you can average 14 pounds a day for three days, you should be in contention for the title – that was the consensus.
3. Table Rock Lake is changing by the day. The water surface temperature has dropped about 10 degrees recently, into the upper 60s. Bass are fully into the summer to fall transition.
Garrett Paquette came here two weeks ago and, “lit ’em up pretty good.” So he was feeling confident when he got here for practice, but, “I got my feelings hurt pretty bad.”
“This lake has completely changed in two weeks and it’s going to keep changing during the event,” Paquette said. “So the guy who stays on top of the conditions is the one who is going to do well. Each day is going to be something a little different.”