With only one hour of fishing to go, Kyoya Fujita just caught his 5th fish of the day. The long-awaited limit fish for the 26-year-old Japanese finesse fishing phenom was a kicker weighing 5 pounds, 5 ounces. Adding this fish to the 5-3 he caught early this morning, Fujita has five now for 18-10 and has moved into 2nd place. He has two 2-pounders in the boat, in perfect position for a late-day cull to challenge Hunter Shryock’s lead.
Even with a LIVE camera in the boat the last two days, very little is known about what Fujita is doing. There’s an obvious language barrier for this angler from overseas. But it’s likely Fujita knows more than he’s letting on and that this barrier has been made bigger by design. He’s a bass fisherman after all, and his polite smiling and nodding aren’t fooling the competition. He’s calmly trying to keep the cat in the bag as long as he can on the top-secret finesse fishing techniques he’s brought along with him across the big water.
What we know: the baits are tiny, they are very different looking and he’s using them to target suspended fish using his forward-facing sonar. That’s about all we have to go on for now.
*As I was writing this, Fujita just boated another quality bass to oust Shryock for the lead. That makes 4 good ones in the last hour for Fujita. He only caught 2 in his previous 5 hours of fishing, taking into account he missed the first hour of the day due to mechanical issues. We’ll likely see more fireworks from Fujita in these last few minutes.
