Elite

Pickwick practice with Atkins

Posted on
Photography by
Shaye Baker
Practice begins for the Whataburger Bassmaster Elite at Pickwick Lake.
Come along as we hitch a ride with one of the Elite Series pros that knows a great deal about Pickwick …
… Justin Atkins. Atkins has lived in Florence, Ala. near the shores of Pickwick Lake for five years now, but he has fished the lake all his life.
As we hop in the boat, Atkins settles in behind the steering wheel and begins to eye his graphs.
There will be a lot of graphing done here this week, as anglers search for offshore schools of bass.
The water temps are hovering in the upper 70s, and the fish should be well on their way out to the ledges.
Atkins moves to the front deck …
… where he has two more Lowrance graphs fired up and ready to scour the bottom.
A school of small fish show up on his ActiveTarget forward facing sonar, but these don’t look like bass to Atkins.
This is what you’ll see a lot of here this week on Pickwick, anglers with their head down eyeing their graphs until they spot a fish or a school of fish and then they’ll make thier cast.
Atkins spots a stump and drops a waypoint.
Atkins tells a story of how the old school guys found offshore fish back in the day before all the advancements in electronics. One of the tricks was to troll two crankbaits behind the boat, and whenever they’d doubled up, the angler knew there was a school there. Then he would have to triangulate using landmarks on the shore to make a mental note of where the fish were so he could relocate them the next outing.
Let’s pause to take a look around Atkins’s boat at a few of his sponsors.
The Dometic cooler riding on the back deck during practice.
Back to graphing.
Atkins is running Lowrance’s C-Map technology, which shades the depths in a range of different colors to make the humps, ledges and other offshore contour easier to see.
Atkins recalls the good ole days when he used to fish Pickwick in college. Back then, if you saw a fish on the graph you could usually catch it. Now it’s a bit trickier. Electronics are so much more powerful and many anglers have gotten really good at using them. So the fish are constantly being fished for and have become conditioned to many of the same old tricks.
Time to go in the box and look for something else to try to fire up this school.
Atkins pulls out a crankbait. Certainly something the fish have seen before, but they’ve seen it all by now. And a crankbait still catches them as good as anything else offshore.
Back to the graph, as the boat drifts across a school of fish.
Atkins fires away.
Another school, a little more spaced out and a little tighter to the bottom. This is starting to look a little more promising.
The wind is picking up on Pickwick, and the waves are starting to white cap.
Atkins reluctantly resorts to a spinning rod for a few casts, trying to keep the fish honest and make sure they won’t bite something with a little more finesse.
Definitely not pedal to the metal most of the time in practice. A lot of slow idling happening on Pickwick right now.
As Atkins continues to eye the graphs.
There are a good bit of recreational boaters out on the lake as well, celebrating Memorial Day. We’d like to honor all those who gave their lives in service to this country. We are out here today enjoying the freedoms that they paid the ultimate price for. Thank you.
Atkins hooks up
The fish breaks the surface.
A nice chunk for Atkins.
Other anglers graph around nearby. There’s rarely a time when you can’t see another five or six boats idling around or fishing.
Lunch time, a BLT it is.
The pleasure boaters are really getting going as we near noon.
We leave Atkins still graphing around, looking for that magical 20-yard stretch out of the couple hundred miles of ledges up for grabs this week. It’s out there. Someone will find it. We’ll see who on Thursday as the Whataburger Bassmater Elite at Pickwick Lake gets underway.

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