It’s still going to take over 100 pounds to win, as usual, at Lake Fork. But the past three days of practice, which included a violent thunderstorm Tuesday, left many of the 102 Elite Series anglers uncertain on exactly how they’re going to get to that 25-pounds-plus average per day when the Tackle Warehouse Bassmaster Elite at Lake Fork begins today.
“I’ll probably have 12 to 15 rods on my deck and probably I expect to throw all of them,” said Brandon Palaniuk, who finished second here in 2022. “It could go either way. I’ve got a lot of different things. I’m literally gonna fish from 25 feet of water to 3 feet of water.”
The Lake Fork level is 403.77 and full pool is 403. That doesn’t sound like much, but this 27,000-acre lake is surrounded by mostly flat terrain, so that extra 3/4ths of a foot spreads out over acres.
“It’s as high as it has ever been any time I’ve ever been here,” said Greg Hackney, who finished 39th last year and was 13th in 2022. “There’s a lot more vegetation now than there’s ever been.The lake is really, really healthy now.”
And there’s a lot of healthy bass doing a lot of different things, from feasting on a shad spawn for several hours each morning to spawning to guarding fry. It seems the bass are spread throughout the water column, but the big schools out deep have been hard to locate. The water surface temperature was in the low 70s during practice, on the cool side for early May in central Texas.
Gerald Swindle, who finished tied with Palaniuk (102-2) in 2022, but took third in a tiebreaker, believes you’re going to have to clear out any notions of past history at Lake Fork to be successful this week.
“It’s not how we imagined it would be, so you’ve got to forget all that,” Swindle said. “I caught a couple of big ones in the timber on a jerkbait. I’m gonna go do that early, and then I’m gonna go fish my strength.”
That means going shallow.
“If I find a couple big ones on bed, fine. If I can get a couple bigger ones on a swim jig, fine. But I think the key for me and a key for a lot of guys this time is just whoever can erase their history and just go fishing.”
