CLARENDON COUNTY, S.C. — Greg Hackney was ready to fish Day 3 of the Guaranteed Rate Bassmaster Elite Series at Santee Cooper Lakes before it was postponed due to the potential for severe winds and storms. With a little front coming through during weigh-in yesterday, he remarked that spawning fish would likely bite better in suboptimal conditions.
But now, sitting in third place with a two-day total of 48 pounds, 1 ounce, and a sizable deficit to leader Drew Cook, the Gonzales, La., resident will have to wait until Sunday to return to Santee Cooper Lakes and attempt to overtake the leader with one less day to do it.
“This would have been a good day to fish,” the three-time Elite Series champion said. “I’m going to fish tomorrow like I was going to fish today. That will give me the best chance to maintain where I’m at. I want a good finish regardless. So far, I feel like I have made the right decisions. I’m going to keep on with my original game plan.”
“The biggest factor in this tournament is getting to a place that the locals didn’t fish today,” he added.
Before the start of this event, Hackney had not visited Lakes Marion or Moultrie in a while, but his experience during the two previous springtime Bassmaster events has helped him figure out what the bass do when these waves of weather rush into the area.
“I’ve been here two times and both times, this exact same scenario happened where we started practice with colder weather and I worked them over, and I got beat by sight fishermen at the end,” he said. “Looking at the weather this time, I’m going to play the game. It would have been even better if we had started the tournament on our off day.”
Hackney has spent the first two days blind casting for bass he believed to be spawning around shallow cover. On day one, that strategy resulted in a 27-pound, 14-ounce five-bass limit before catching 20-3 on the second day.
Dirty water in his primary area made sight fishing impossible, so he fished each piece of cover thoroughly and precisely, visualizing where a bass might be set up on a bed and presenting the bait the same way he would if he could see the fish. After only fishing half the stretch of bank on Day 1, Hackney started on the other side and worked his way down, catching four keeper bass in approximately the first hour and filling his limit a little while later with a 5-pounder.
That 5-pounder was in the same piece of cover that Hackney caught a 6-pounder the previous day.
“It is easy to fish over them,” he said. “When there is that much cover in the water, everyone wants to get in a hurry.”
Using a Lew’s Hyperspeed reel has also paid dividends. He can pull the bass out of the cover quickly and flip them in the boat before the bass has a chance to come off. A lighter sinker slows the rate of fall of Hackney’s bait.
“You see how fast they come out of that stuff and it is wild,” Hackney said. “I can pull them with the rod but I need to be able to keep up with the line. Yesterday I swung one, must have been close to a 5-pounder, and when I got it in the hook had never come through. The instant I set the hook it came out so fast. That’s why I don’t fool with them. If I had gone down to lip it, it was coming off.”
While he got off to a fast start on Friday, Hackney’s late morning and afternoon were not as productive as he had hoped. The bass he did catch weren’t nearly as big as he wanted.
“I’m almost 100 percent sure that I had five males yesterday that weighed 20 pounds,” he explained. “Hindsight is 20/20, I probably should have pulled the plug yesterday at 12 o’clock and went looking.”
With size and quantity running out in that area, Hackney is ready to make a move into clearer water on Championship Sunday in an area where he saw plenty of bass in practice and sight fish.
“I practiced for this. I spent all day Tuesday on the trolling motor looking,” he explained. “I felt like I fished conservative up (where I was) the first couple days to guarantee me something. Fishing was not good and a lot of those fish down there in practice were really wild. There were 29 bags over 20 pounds yesterday, and I knew it was time. I’m probably going to need 25 or 30 pounds tomorrow.”
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