Final Event of the FLW Tour season on the Big “G”

When I returned to Guntersville for the official practice, a lot had changed since I’d been there just a few weeks earlier. There weren’t as many easily located schools of fish, but once you found them they were bunched up even tighter and in greater numbers. You also had to weed through a lot of them to find any decent ones.

The other change was the fact that the grass had exploded which moved a lot of fish shallow. That gave you two options – stay out and fish the ledges, where I was catching them on a ¾ ounce Lunker Lure football head jig and a Strike King 6XD crankbait, or stay shallow, where I could get a lot of bites pitching a Reaction Innovations Sweet Beaver or a Grass Monster Jig.

Even though the fish were spread among the two depths, it still wasn’t easy. The lake was crowded, and while bites weren’t tough to come by, finding the right school was a needle in a haystack deal. I felt like it would be won on the deep bite so I spent a lot of time with my Humminbird using both the down imaging and side imaging technologies. As a result I felt that I found some schools with potential – maybe not the winning fish, but enough to do pretty well.

On Day One I ran to what I thought was my biggest school and found only one other angler there, my good friend Shin Fukae. For 2 ½ hours we sat there and it was just stupid, a fish on every cast. We both left several times and came back and you could pretty much call your shot. The problem was that the better bites were random. In fact, the biggest bag that came out of there that day was my co-angler’s 18 pounds. It was a hundred yard area so there was nothing you could do to protect it except hope that you put it in front of the right fish. I was severely disappointed by my 13 pound limit, but I felt that just a few more good bites on Day Two and I still had a chance to do well.

On the second morning, I started in the same area and had a limit in 30 minutes, but it was obvious that the school was starting to diminish. In fact, Shin never caught a keeper there. Either we’d damaged the school or else they’d moved on. I tend to think it was the latter. In response, I went shallow for several hours but couldn’t really upgrade much. Finally, with a couple of hours left I made a run up the river to go cranking. I caught my best fish of the day, but also lost two big ones, which really hurt. In this tournament it seemed like whenever I got the right bite, something always went wrong and I couldn’t make it stop. I’m not crying about it now, but it continues to confound me.

Day Three was a short day on the water for me. In order to reduce fish mortality, FLW decided to have us weigh in at 1:30. Once again I hoped that my starting spot would pay off, but those fish were gone. I never got a bite there. With the short day, I didn’t really want to make the 30 mile run up river. ON top of that, I fished a little fast. As I said before, something I can’t figure out must be wrong with my mechanics because I got 30 good bites in a 2 ½ hour period and only boated four of them. In a word, it was horrible.

Still, I didn’t give up hope. I had one spot near the launch that I’d save, a shellbed maybe 50 or 75 yards long, but when I got there the tournament leader, Brent Long, was camped on it. So much for that idea. In short, I was around the right fish but I suppose I didn’t make the right adjustments. There were good stringers caught both shallow and deep, but I couldn’t make it happen this time. Less than 40 pounds over three days on Guntersville is simply not good.

That disappointment marks the end of a disappointing FLW Tour season, but I’m going to keep my chin up. I learned so much about the lake this year and I was so close to putting it all together on the 3^rd day that I felt like I was ready to start over again as soon as it was over – and this time the result would be different.

Now it’s off to start the PAA tour and to finish up the Bassmaster Opens, and perhaps fish a few other tournaments too. This is what I do for a living and the more I fish the better I feel. FLW has announced their 2011 schedule, and it’ll have us going back and forth across the country several times, along with increased entry fees, but I’ll worry about that when it gets here. Right now, I need to get back to business as usual.

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