TOUR SUMMARY

FLW Tour Event, Lake Guntersville, Huntsville, AL  June 23rd-26th

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.  Read More

FLW Tour Event, Lake Ouachita, Hot Springs, AR  June May 26th-29th

I had fished the Forrest Wood Cup on Lake Ouachita back in the summer of 2007, but I still didn’t know quite what to expect when we returned this year. I expected that my past experiences would inform my game plan, but I also knew that conditions wouldn’t be quite the same as they were during that hot August event just three years ago.

Mother Nature threw us a curveball heading into the tournament – right before practice the lake jumped up about three and a half feet which put the water in the bushes and gave it some color. There was a lot of newly flooded cover and I’m a sucker for that, but I also suspected that things would change again by the time the tournament ended….and they did. I wanted to chase that shallow bite but with the water falling again it was a guessing game as to how long the fish would be there.  Read More

BASS Southern Open – Lewis Smith Lake, Jasper, AL May 13th – 15th

Heading into the second Southern Open of the year, I was determined to keep an open mind. I have a pretty good track record on Smith Lake but I know that it can be a difficult fishery. The spotted bass are dominant but there’s a decent largemouth fishery as well and I wanted to give them both a fair shake. Still, I had it in the back of my mind that the spots were more likely to bunch up better and therefore they’d be more reliable.  Read More

FLW Tour Event – Ft. Loudoun/Tellico Lakes, Knoxville, TN  April 21st-24th

This wasn’t the tour’s first time at Ft. Loudoun – Tellico, and I thought I understood what was likely to happen there. That belief persisted through practice, but in the end, I didn’t have a clue.

I started off practicing on Tellico, in areas where I’d done well before, doing the things I’d done to catch them previously. As hoped, I had a really good first day. My best five probably would’ve weighed somewhere in the 12 to 14 pound range, and just as importantly I was catching really good numbers of fish. They weren’t on the beds. They were getting set up to come up to the beds and they were sitting ducks. The weather was projected to be stable and I figured they’d be easy pickings.  Read More

FLW Tour Event – Lake Norman, Charlotte, NC  March 24th – 27th  

We’ve been to North Carolina’s Lake Norman on multiple occasions now and Norman and I have never really gotten along. Despite that fact, I still went into this tournament with a great attitude, ready to practice hard. I’d thought quite a bit about what the fish would be doing – I did my research and kept an eye on the weather, but the one thing I couldn’t prepare for is illness. I spent two days of practice with the flu and I feel like that really hurt my chances. Getting bites wasn’t a problem but finding bigger fish, particularly largemouths, was tough. I needed all the time on the water I could get.  Read More.

FLW Tour Event - Table Rock Lake, Branson, MO  March 3rd – 6th

The first FLW Tour event of 2010, scheduled for February on the Red River, was canceled due to conditions that the tournament director determined to be unsafe. The result is that each of the other five regular season event counts even more – bomb in one and your chances of making Angler of the Year or even the championship are pretty much done. So even though my goal for the year is to make some bold moves and shoot for a major league tour win, I know it’s important to guard against a complete disaster.  Read More

Bass Southern Open – Lake Okeechobee, Okeechobee, FL  Jan. 14th-16th

Welcome back to my tour journal. This year’s entries will be familiar in that I intend to chronicle my tournament efforts, but it’ll also be a little bit different. The difference will be about my attitude. I’ve had some success in my career, qualifying for multiple Bassmaster Classics and an FLW Championship, even a Stren points championship, but frankly I’m a little bit disappointed – I figured by this time I’d have some tour-level wins and either a championship victory or an Angler of the Year title. So I headed into 2010 with a renewed focus on taking some chances to pick up my first major win.  Read More

Toyota Texas Bass Classic – Lake Conroe, Montgomery, TX  Oct. 16th-19th (2009)

One of my goals for the 2009 Tournament season was to qualify for the Toyota Texas Bass Classic, which for two years prior was a four-man, team concept, which changed in 2009 to our Carrot Stix PAA Tour Series Championship. Read More