John Garrett thought he’d found a pattern for success at Lake Fork after three days of practice this week. But his 10th-place bag wasn’t caught as planned, nowhere close, on the first day of the Tackle Warehouse Bassmaster Elite.
“I thought I had a little bit of a grip on what I could do to put a good bag together,” Garrett said. “And that was not the case. How I thought I was going to catch ‘em is the way I caught my smallest fish.”
Garrett’s day was the definition of the term “junk fishing,” where there’s no dominant pattern and you have to use a variety of lures in a wide range of depths to catch fish.
“This morning I just had a little tingly feeling, and I stopped on this random point I’ve never seen before,” he said. “I caught an 8-pounder on a (Zara) Spook. So I caught one on a Spook. I caught one on a jerkbait. I caught one on a (soft plastic jighead) minnow. I caught one on a Neko rig, and I caught one on a Chatterbait in the back of a pocket.
“I caught the five fish I weighed fishing five different ways on five different baits. I caught that one on a Spook in a foot of water, and then I caught that one on the minnow in 28 feet that was on the bottom. I have nothing dialed in. I have no clue whether to turn left or right or go straight. I’m just gonna go fishing.”
Lake Fork, where six five-bass limits topping 30 pounds were weighed on Day 1, is like the prize inside a box of Cracker Jack – you never know what you’re going to get.
Brandon Palaniuk was planning on Fork fishing like this, which is why he had over a dozen rods on his boat deck at takeoff yesterday. While he said his 7th-place weight of 29-6 came mostly on only two of those rods, he plans to have just as many on the deck at takeoff for Day 2.
“There’s fish spread out everywhere,” Palaniuk said. “There’s big ones doing all sorts of things. I can catch a 6-pounder on a (spawning) bed. You can get a 6-pounder in 25 or 30 feet of water, and everywhere in between. That’s the tricky part – you can’t just do one thing, I don’t feel like, right now.”
Amidst all the Lake Fork accolades of six 30-pound bags and 14 more topping the 25-pound mark, no one was talking about it being easy. These are maybe the most educated bass in the United States, based on the amount of year-round pressure they receive. The margin between success and failure is tiny.
“I had one bass until like noon today,” Palaniuk said. “It was a freaking struggle. Then I finally got on the right rotation, made couple of the right moves and had some lucky things happen. I caught six fish today, and one of them was a pound-and-a-quarter 14-incher.”
Garrett thinks Lake Fork’s bass could get more patternable as this four-day tournament continues. Palaniuk doesn’t think so.
“I think we’re gonna see it evolve to where the Sunday top 10, some of those guys are going to be on a deep offshore bite,” Garrett said. “That’s what I love to do, and I could not dial it in (Thursday). But I’m gonna say part of the top five will be fishing deep schools, whether it’s a minnow or a crankbait or whatever. But for everybody else I think it’s going to be junk fishing. We’ve got a whole lot of patterns going right now.”
Palaniuk doesn’t think the schools of offshore bass will appear until after this tournament ends on Sunday.
“There’s one main direction they’re going over all right now, and that’s post-spawn,” he said. “I mean there are still fish spawning, and I think there’s still some more fish moving up to spawn but it’s very little. More fish should be moving out away from the bank, but with the water being up, there’s lots of vegetation, lots of fresh grass, things like that, where they’re gonna stay there for a while.”
Finally, there’s this story. Palaniuk mentioned having some luck on Day 1. The ultimate example came when his deep-diving crankbait got hung. When he couldn’t shake it loose, he got out a plug-knocker. He wanted that crankbait back.
“I slid my plug knocker down the line, hit my crankbait and it doesn’t come off,” Palaniuk said. “I’m shaking my bait, and I’m trying to get it off. All the sudden a fish eats it off the bottom, and then gets stuck in a tree. I can feel my line rub on the tree. It finally shakes loose, and when the fish comes out of the tree it jumps next to the boat. My plug-knocker is sliding up and down my line, flinging around everywhere. I finally landed it. It’s a 6 ½-pounder. And that was my second fish.”
That’s how thin the line is between success and failure on Lake Fork right now.
