My biggest takeaway from last week’s Lowrance Bassmaster Elite at Lake Tenkiller is that sometimes, it just doesn’t go right.
The last time we fished this lake was my rookie year (2019), and I finished 14th. That was a different time of year and now, we have forward-facing sonar so you could go offshore and catch them floating around. Obviously, we had a bunch of rain, so guys were catching them in the bushes.
We all figured out the lake is full of fish and you can kind of do whatever you want. I caught smallmouth and largemouth and, honestly, you couldn’t concentrate on one or the other. You’d catch largemouth everywhere you’d catch smallmouth, and you’d catch smallmouth everywhere you’d catch largemouth.
I was catching a largemouth on Humminbird MEGA Live 2 out in 100 feet of water. I caught largemouth on bluffs; I caught smallmouth on bluffs. I caught both species flipping bushes and fishing topwaters on the bank.
They were mixed together all throughout the lake, and I caught both. I fished offshore, I fished the bank and I fished the bushes.
I had a really good practice, and I thought I was going do really well. I had a lot of options, but it just didn’t go right.
I had a couple of really good stretches of bushes, but the water dropped just a little bit the night before the tournament, so the fish weren’t in the bushes I started on.
I had some deeper bushes where I had caught fish, but I didn’t start in them. I also had some stuff down the lake where the fish were suspended and roaming out deep. I just got there a little bit late because I started on what turned out to be a dead zone.
When I got to my area down the lake, there were two other anglers there and they had already caught ‘em really good. I just didn’t catch ‘em.
I lost a lot of fish on topwaters that first afternoon; I mean giant ones. Some missed my bait; some I hooked and lost. It was big largemouth and big smallmouth.
I fished bluffs, rocks and windblown areas, and I probably had 16 big bites that first afternoon. I came back up and salvaged my day by fishing some of the bushes where they were biting, but I only caught 11 1/2 pounds.
I really should’ve had 16 to 18 pounds downlake, so on Day 2, I went back down there thinking I would catch ‘em on topwater. We had the same cloudy, rainy conditions, and I mixed in a couple of baits I thought I could get them to trigger on. I just didn’t catch ‘em.
I ran that stuff for a couple of hours in the morning but only had a couple of little keepers. Then I tried to do the offshore forward-facing sonar stuff, but it wasn’t happening. They were already done.
I ran back up the lake to the bushes where I caught them the first day, and they were biting again. I caught six or eight right off the bat, but just no big ones. Then the day was over. I was like, “What the heck just happened?”
It as one of the worst finishes of my career on a fishery I should have done well on. It was right up my alley. I’ve won major tournaments on similar fisheries when the water was fluctuating. I know where to be; I know what to do. I just didn’t get it done.
It was all about timing, and I missed it. I don’t have any excuses. That one hurt, I’m not going to lie.
The key to fishing fluctuating conditions is keeping an open mind. You saw that with Wes Logan and several of the top finishers; they weren’t just fishing the same bushes every day. The guys that did well adapted.
I kind of got sucked into what I saw instead of just fishing the conditions, and it bit me.
