There’s no sugar-coating it — finishing 90th at Lake Fork sucks. But I had a bad practice, and unlike last year when I thought I’d do better, this year I just never figured anything out. I kind of felt it coming.
It wasn’t as bad, if that makes sense, but it’s always disappointing when I do bad here. I want to do well for the fans, for Lake Fork, Texas, my family and all my sponsors.
I always want to do well on my home ponds, but I never got a clue. I kept trying to push certain things that, if they got right, they’d get right in a hurry, but it just never happened.
I was trying to catch them offshore on shallow hard spots with crankbaits, a jig, flutter spoon, hair jig, a big worm — just your generic offshore game plan. I had some schools that just were covered up both of the first two days.
I got in a bad rotation, and I never got to fish ‘em so I didn’t make the third day cut.
Some of the guys absolutely blasted them, but the lake just fished really small on the stuff I was trying to push. I only had four or five deep schools, and there was always a boat on ‘em all day, every day.
I just never fit in, so I kept looking and trying to find new stuff offshore I thought I could win on, and I just never found anything fresh. With the stuff I had found in practice, nothing ever opened up for me.
I never really spent much time shallow because I was looking for that unicorn spot, that needle in a haystack. When I went to the bank, I just wasn’t around enough. I missed some big ones and lost some giants on Day 1, but I wasn’t dialed in enough.
To tell you how hard it was for me to find something to fish, I idled almost six hours on Day 2. I din’t fish pretty much the entire day. After I fished a little bit in the morning, I looked and looked and looked, but it just never happened.
It wasn’t really a water level deal, it wasn’t really a time of year deal. The guys still caught ‘em, and it’s my job to catch ‘em too. I just didn’t catch ‘em.
I knew coming into this week that in the phase they’re in, they’re just pulling out to the offshore spots and not a lot of them are on the bottom. A lot of them are just floating around those deep holes.
That’s how a lot of guys caught ‘em. They took their forward-facing sonar units, and they caught them floating around the offshore spots, instead of catching them on the bottom like I’m used to doing.
I learned my lesson, but now it’s time to go back to work. We have the next Elite at the Sabine River this week, and even though I’m mad at myself about not doing well at Fork, I’m turning that frustration into motivation.
