When you think about how to kick off a new Bassmaster Elite season with a bang, Lake Guntersville is about as good a place as any. It’s super healthy right now, it fishes big and it’s full of big fish, so it’s a great place to start the year.
We won’t be allowed to use forward-facing sonar in this event, so you’ll see a lot of guys use more traditional stuff like vibrating jigs, lipless crankbaits and jerkbaits. You’re going to see bridges play, you’re going to see grass play and with this cold weather, there’s going to be some guys catching them offshore as well.
I think this will be almost entirely a winter patterns event. Anything that’s going to be traditional prespawn related is going to have a sheet of ice over the top of it, and we’re not even going to be able to fish it. There might be a little bit of early prespawn activity, but the water’s going to be in the 30s, so good luck.
There’s no question, this is going to be a cold tournament, and we’re going to get some precipitation on the first day. Whether that’s rain, sleet or snow, I can’t say, but I do know it’ll make for challenging conditions.
It won’t be easy, but if you can just power through it with your preparation and your mental toughness, you’ll have an advantage. You just have to overcome the conditions and find ways to get bites.
If we were able to use forward-facing sonar, I think this event would set up perfectly for that. This cold will have a lot of fish pulled out, so we would wreck ‘em.
Even without the live sonar technology, you can still fish the areas where the fish will be suspending. I’m sure there’s going to be multiple guys catch them with forward-facing sonar tactics like jighead minnows, jerkbaits and dice baits, even without the ability to see the fish. I’ll try my hand at it every day of practice.
The good thing about Guntersville is it’s the perfect place to just go fishing. It’s full of giants, it has grass, shell, offshore structure, current, wood, rocks. It has smallmouth, largemouth, spotted bass; there’s 75 miles of lake to go fish your style.
It will be interesting to see how the pro-forward-facing sonar guys and the guys who don’t particularly favor it end up. Especially with this big cold front, it could flip-flop some things toward the forward-facing guys, so this one could become very interesting by the final day.
Regardless of what patterns end up dominating, I think the weights will still be really good. I don’t think our catch numbers will be that high, but I think we’ll see a lot of big bags.
There will probably be fewer fish overall, but I think it’s entirely possible for someone to need 100 pounds to win. In fact, there could be a couple guys break the century mark at this event.
After all, we’re talking about Guntersville, and this lake has ‘em.
