The Tombigbee and Arkansas River Elite events were tournaments for me to get back in the saddle and make some really good decisions. They turned out to be good events for me.
It’s always great to make the Top 10, and I did it early this season after almost not requalifying for the Progressive Bassmaster Elite Series last year. After having a couple of less-than-stellar performances to start the year off, it felt really good to crack that Top 10 again.
It was a week of good decisions. When you go to a place like that, there’s always a decision to make. Do I make really long runs and choose limited fishing time after locking through and the risk of the locks themselves? I made the choice to stay close and maximize my fishing time by picking apart every little piece of cover I could find. I chose to make the most of it, and that’s what happened.
I fished really slowly and methodically. I started out throwing a swim jig around, and I just wasn’t getting the response I wanted. I turned to a Strike King Rage Monkey. I rigged it on a 1/4-ounce Tour Grade Tungsten Worm hook with a Gamakatsu Worm Hook and swam that around the hay grass in place of the jig. I caught a lot of fish on it.
By now you all know that anytime I can flip, I am going to. I ended up catching them on a Strike King Game Hog with my 5/0 Gamakatsu Heavy Cover Hook. I used 20-pound Seaguar InvizX Fluorocarbon on a 7-foot, 6-inch Lew’s Flipping stick and 8.3:1 Lew’s Hypermag reel around hard cover targets.
Day 2 was a real comeback day for me. Everything slicked off, and I was having a little bit of a hard time getting things rolling. I just had this gut feeling I needed to be throwing a popper. I took out a Strike King KVD Splash and just went to work in a shade line and got the bites I needed on Day 2 to move and be able to make the Top 10.
It really was a matter of about 40 minutes where I caught a couple of good 3-pounders. Those helped me see what was going on and expand a little bit.
There was a stretch of water that really made me think about the popper. The stretch had a deep cut bank that had a shade line on it, which kept the fish on the edge of the shade. I caught a decent one about every 20 yards or so and filled my limit. That gave me the comfort level I needed to sit back and slide into the 50 cut, and I just progressed from there.
I took a slightly different approach in Oklahoma on the Arkansas River. I flipped a 3/8-ounce Strike King Hack Attack Fluorocarbon Jig with a Rage Craw trailer and two different colors of the Rage Bugs, depending on the water color. However, my key bait for the week was a Colorado / Willow 1/2-ounce Hack Attack Spinnerbait. I upsized the willowleaf blade a size to make a bigger presence in the water. I also added a Gamakatsu trailer hook on the bait and a curl-tailed trailer.
I locked at the Arkansas River because I was getting the most bites down on Kerr, but with the speed of my Falcon Boats 21 Predator and Yamaha 250SHO, I had no trouble getting to where I needed to and back. I finished in 29th place and moved up to 42nd place in the Progressive Bassmaster Angler of the Year points.
On another note, I got the chance to fish with my friend Alexander Bolding and Blake Capps in Oklahoma prior to the event in Muskogee. We have a little story on Bassmaster.com about the day, and it’s worth a read – he’s an amazing young man and so is his family.
I’m looking forward to the rest of the season. I feel like I’ve got a little giddyup in my step to make good decisions and build on what we just did.
