GREENVILLE, S.C. — Mike Iaconelli would have gladly accepted being further behind the leader going into the final day of the GEICO Bassmaster Classic presented by GoPro.
"These Classics are great, when there's not a blowout," said the 2003 Bassmaster Classic champion. "Ideally, I'd like to be in the top five or six, a couple of pounds down. That's the place for me. No pressure."
A half-hour later, when the Day 2 weigh-in was complete, Iaconelli couldn't keep the smile off his face when he found out he was in third place, only 11 ounces behind leader Takahiro Omori. Iaconelli had a limit weighed 16 pounds, 9 ounces Saturday, giving him a two-day total of 31-0.
If Iaconelli has an advantage over the other contenders, it's the fact that the nomadic blueback herring won't be a factor in most of his day. After spending the first hour, or 90 minutes at the most, looking for bass feeding on the herring in shallow water, he'll start running and gunning.
Actually, he'll be running and gunning all day. He won't spend much time looking in the various shallow lake pockets, trying to catch bass feeding on bluebacks. The birds will tell him whether to stop and make a cast, one specific species of bird in fact.
"You have to look for the loons," Iaconelli said. "Loons love those bluebacks."
Some early bites would be nice, but his day is set no matter what happens early.
"If you can get out there early and have 2, 3, 4 in your livewell, it's big," Iaconelli said. "On a normal day, the cutoff time for that is 9 o'clock. It might extend another half-hour tomorrow because of the weather. It's all determined by the bait."
As soon as Iaconelli sees that the herring have moved from the shallows, he will head to deep water and a pattern that doesn't need the bluebacks to be effective. During the five days that Iaconelli spent on Lake Hartwell before the Jan. 1 cutoff time, he idled over much of the lake, marking GPS waypoints, color-coded to show everything from boat docks to deep docks with brush to rock to ledges to brushpiles.
It's the brushpiles located in 20 to 40 feet of water — 50 to 60 of them — that Iaconelli will spend the majority of his day on, making no more than one cast on many of them. He will be hoping for five bites. He only got four on Day 1. He's fishing the brushpiles with a green-pumpkin jig.
"Here's my struggle," Iaconelli said. "You have to have that jig on the bottom. You've got to have contact with the cover. But I have no groups of fish. I have 50 or 60 spots I've tried to hit each day. Seriously. So I'm fishing against the clock.
"So I'm trying to hit all 50 or 60, but fish the jig slow enough. That's the biggest struggle for me.
"If I make one cast, hit that key piece of cover and don't get a bite, I'm out of there."
When Iaconelli arrived in December, he'd broken-in a new outboard motor in New Jersey previously. It had 3 ½ hours on it. When he left Hartwell, it had 47 ½ hours on it.
"It was all idle time," Iaconelli said.
In the past week, he has eliminated all the other cover that he'd marked in December.
There was one more key piece of information Iaconelli discovered in December.
"When I caught a good fish, I'd always look down his throat and feel his belly," he said. "They had what I call lobsters down their throats. Magnum crawfish. They were real green with a little orange on them.
"That just made me more confident that you don't have to have blueback herring as part of the equation here. I think they're eating just as many crawfish as they are blueback herring."
Whether that's true or not will become apparent Sunday. It will probably be a grind. Iaconelli went almost three hours without a bite Saturday. He picked up a spinning rod and one point and started to go hit some boat docks. But he decided to stick with his pattern.
"At about the three-hour mark, I catch two back-to-back," Iaconelli said. "Two really good ones that made a big difference.
"In an Elite (Series) event, I don't know that I'd fish this way because you've got points and pounds and qualifications you're worried about. But this is the Classic. Screw it, man.
"I just want five of those deep bites."