GREENVILLE, S.C. — Jacob Powroznik will remember Day 1 of the 2015 GEICO Bassmaster Classic until the day he dies. And it’s a nightmare. Instead of catching a 15- to 20-pound limit of bass in the first hour, he was sitting in his boat at the takeoff area, like everyone else in the field. The frigid cold weather on February 20 left a handful of boats frozen to their trailers, unable to launch. So there was a two-hour weather delay before the start.
That prevented Powroznik from utilizing what is known as the “weapon bite” – a not-so-secret weapon for taking advantage of the blueback herring that are a key forage for Lake Hartwell bass. It’s strictly an early morning tactic. Big schools of herring gather in the backs of shallow pockets and drains at night. They start leaving at first light, and there are plenty of bass waiting on them for breakfast.
“By far, it’s the best place I’ve ever had for a tournament – ever,” said Powroznik of the pocket he found in 2015. “When you feel you’ve got a really, really good chance of winning, and you don’t get to fish it the first day, yeah, I’ll never forget that.”
Without the first two hours to capitalize on Day 1, Powroznik weighed-in only four fish totaling 9 pounds, 2 ounces. It left him in 25th place. He caught a limit weighing 15-0 the second day, which moved him up to 18th. Then he really showed what the “weapon bite” is all about with 18-15 on Day 3, which earned him a 5th place finish.
“The second day, on my first 28 casts I caught a bass,” Powroznik said. “On Day 3 I had a writer with me. After I’d caught about 15 in a row, he tells me to slow down because he can’t keep up, trying to put them in BASSTrakk. I’m just lighting them up.”
Powroznik finished exactly 7 pounds behind 2015 Classic champ Casey Ashley. With the 16-pounds-plus he was expecting on Day 1 – before the weather delay – Powroznik might have been the Classic champ.
Powroznik’s story bears recalling as an illustration of what will occur during the first hour of each day at the 2018 Classic. Not every angler will be able to execute the “weapon bite.” Some won’t even try. But many will, including Mike Iaconelli.
“Blueback herring do the same thing all year round, every night,” Iaconelli said. “When it gets dark in the evening, those bluebacks will move into the backs of drains or cuts or draws, whatever you want to call them. I don’t know why, but they go back in there by the hundreds.
“As soon as that little bit of light cracks the sky in the morning, about 6:45 or 6:50, they instinctually turn and start coming back out of those drains to the main lake. It’s a really weird phenomenon. And it only lasts an hour, an hour-and-a-half at most.
“The bass know how to take advantage of that. I’ve known about the bite for about 15 years. I was told it is called ‘the weapon bite.’ It’s a big weapon to have in your arsenal when you’re fishing these tournaments. In the Classic, to have 10 or 12 pounds in the first hour is like gold.”
But capitalizing on this pattern isn’t as easy as it sounds. First of all, blueback herring don’t necessarily gather in the same pockets every night. Secondly, some pockets will have a significantly bigger population of herring than others, and therefore a larger school of bass in pursuit.
When Powroznik found the mother lode in 2015, he noticed 50 to 100 bass following one that he’d hooked as he reeled it back to the boat during practice.
“All those bass were right by the boat, so I turned and fired as far as I could cast in the opposite direction, and the bait never hit the bottom,” he said. Bass were gathered enmasse.
That discovery in practice is what left Powroznik so confident going into the 2015 Classic, and so disappointed when he couldn’t take advantage of it on Day 1.
“The key is you’ve got to find the point where bass are intercepting those herring as they come out,” Iaconelli said. “There’s usually some kind of structure deal there. That’s the key spot. If you go back and look at what Powroznik was doing the last time we were here, he’s making the same cast over and over. It’s almost like crankbait fishing.”
Iaconelli isn’t shy about revealing that the early herring bite is part of his game plan this week, just like it was in 2015.
“I caught three or four fish in the morning before I went out to my deep stuff (in 2015),” Iaconelli said. “And I’m on the same plan this year.”
The obvious question concerns Powroznik. Has he found another gold mine for the early morning blueback herring bite?
He’ll answer that in the first hour on Friday.