On a lake with as many big bass as Lake Fork, there’s sure to be bunch of big bass stories as well. Brandon Lester and Pat Schlapper had a couple of the best ones after Friday’s second day of the Tackle Warehouse Bassmaster Elite.
In this catch-weigh-and-release format, only those measuring over 24 inches long may be brought to the weigh-in stage and only one per angler. There were seven Friday. Lester had one that weighed 8 pounds, 9 ounces, and it had second-chance story to go with it. He’s positive he hooked that fish earlier in the day.
“It was about 10 o’clock (Friday) morning and I only had three fish at the
time,” said Lester, who was casting a topwater frog in shallow vegetation. “I had a really slow morning. She blew up on it, and it was one of those deals when I set the hook I kind of stung her a little bit. But it wasn’t like solid, so I was like well maybe I can come back later.”
This was one day after Lester, 37, of Fayetteville, Tenn., had weighed the heaviest five-bass limit of his Elite Series career. His first day weight of 29-5 had him in 8th place on Day 1. But Lester was struggling on Day 2 with only 13 pounds on his scorecard. So, 4 1/2 hours after the miss, Lester came back to try the frog bite again.
“I make the same exact cast,” he said. “I’m working my frog. It gets to the same exact spot, and I mean it was like the best frog blowup you’ve ever seen in your life.”
The fish came out of some shallow vegetation that Lester said reminds him of pencil reeds only thinner. He’s sure the bass was on a spawning bed.
“Her tail was bloody, and those big females, if you hit them at just the right time, they’ll bite about whatever comes near that bed. I think I just got real lucky at the right time on the right day.”
The 8-9 was over twice as big as the second-best bass (4-2) Lester had in his best five Friday and gave him 22-9 on the day. He finished Day 2 in 10th place with a two-day total of 51-14.
“It looks pretty decent on paper at the end of the day, but I’m telling you it was a hard, hard day for me,” Lester said. “When I pulled into that pocket at 2:30, I’d caught my fifth one right before that. It was a 2-14, and it gave me 13 pounds. Then I caught that 8-9. About five minutes later I caught a 4-2. My day turned around in a matter of 20 minutes.”
All Lester’s fish Friday came shallow on two lures, the topwater frog and a five-inch soft plastic stick bait.
“I want to think that there’s more of them coming up to start to spawn,” he said. We’re coming up on a full moon (Monday), and I feel like this is gonna be one of the last moons before it gets too hot to spawn. There are new ones showing up every day, but is there like a
wave of them? I don’t know.”
Schlapper’s got a totally different big bass story. In fact, although it happened right in front of his eyes, it occurred so fast that he’s still not exactly sure of the details. But the end result was an 8-pound, 10-ounce bass that anchored a 26-13 day and rocketed Schlapper from 71st place after Day 1 to 31st place Friday.
“I was in an area this morning, and I was fishing in a swim jig on a grass line,” said Schlapper, 42, from Eleva, Wis. “I caught a few, and I came to a point where I caught a nice one in practice on a big square-bill crank bait. I’ve caught a lot of them in the past there. So I picked up my square-bill, and I threw it out there.
“On like my second cast, I hooked a fish. I saw it wasn’t very big when I got it by the boat, but there were three gigantic ones chasing it. I like was like, ‘Oh my God!’ They were right there. Then the little fish fought a little bit right by the boat. I pulled it back up, and all the sudden it disappeared. The next thing I see is the mouth of that 8-10. It’s just jumping out of the water. I think it ate everything – the (little) bass and the bait. It jumped right next to the boat and the little one came off. Somehow I landed the big one. That’s not usually how that goes.”
It happened at 7:59 Friday morning. Schlapper’s second-biggest bass, a 6-9, came at 2:44 in the afternoon. The 6-9 was caught the way Schlapper expected most of his fish to come in this tournament – using forward-facing sonar in deep water with a jighead minnow. Of the other three bass that were among his best five, two came on a swim jig and the other was on a frog. In other words, almost nothing has happened as he expected this week.
“All I know is that I’m just happy to be fishing (Saturday),” Schlapper said.
