I was pleased. I was in 10th place after 2nd day and shot to make cut with decent bag on last day, but never happened. I just caught up with the weather. I was fishing the lower end of the lake and catching a few flipping late in the day when sun was out after my early limit. If the sun wasn’t then I was catching them on a spinnerbait if there were clouds and wind.

The last day I was flipping docks with some sunshine and the bite wasn’t too good. I was just about to make a move to dirtier water and some clouds rolled in. I switched to a spinnerbait, didn’t make the run and in hindsight
wish I’d done that. I thought maybe I could catch a bigger bag in the dirty water.

I’m pleased with 18th. The only time I’m there is with the tournaments when we’re there. It’s just, historically, not a very good fishery and in years past has been notorious for smaller fish.

Predominantly in the tournament I was using a spinnerbait and half-ounce jig. I caught some in practice on a Pointer 78 DD in chartreuse/blue back, but the water wasn’t quite clear enough at the time for that to be real effective. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time doing that because the conditions and clarity weren’t good enough for me.

It was different. I don’t know what the deal was that caused it to be tricky. Right before the cutoff the fishing was insane. They were catching 20 pounds a day. The low ends of the checks (in local tournaments) were 12 pounds or something, so they were catching them really good.

My buddy’s a local there, Brent Long, and he didn’t know what was going on. He said normally it’s really good and it must just have been that in-between period. They really feed well right before the spawn and then there’s a lull before they get on beds, so that must have been it.

I caught them on a shakey head, crankbait and swimbait, most of them on the shakey head. I thought most might come on a swimbait and crankbait. But I had to grind and caught most of them on a Picasso shakey head with a Yamamoto worm.

I was also throwing the S.K.T. MR Crankbait and in stained water I was using the Crack and Gunmetal colors. In clean water I used the Chartreuse Shad. Every day I changed up and did a little something different. I just ran
docks in pockets with good water, and if I had a good stretch or if the wind blew a little bit I’d cover it faster.