Join us as we reel in the insights of our guest, pro angler Drew Gill. He takes us on a captivating journey, from his early college fishing experiences to the high-stakes world of the Invitationals. Drew discusses the role of technology in angling, and shares his strategies for success, making this a must-listen for anyone interested in professional angling.
We tackle some of the biggest changes in professional angling, like the introduction of Live Scope and its impact on the sport. We wind up the episode by diving into the nitty-gritty details of Drew's strategies in the MLF Toyota Series and Invitationals. From getting the best out of your equipment, to understanding the influence of wind conditions, Drew's experiences and strategies provide invaluable insights for both novice and pro anglers. Don't miss this episode packed with real-life fishing experiences, tips, and techniques.
Join us as we reel in the insights of our guest, pro angler Drew Gill. He takes us on a captivating journey, from his early college fishing experiences to the high-stakes world of the Invitationals. Drew discusses the role of technology in angling, and shares his strategies for success, making this a must-listen for anyone interested in professional angling.
We tackle some of the biggest changes in professional angling, like the introduction of Live Scope and its impact on the sport. We wind up the episode by diving into the nitty-gritty details of Drew's strategies in the MLF Toyota Series and Invitationals. From getting the best out of your equipment, to understanding the influence of wind conditions, Drew's experiences and strategies provide invaluable insights for both novice and pro anglers. Don't miss this episode packed with real-life fishing experiences, tips, and techniques.
What's going on? Everyone? We are doing episode two of the Bass Central Fishing Podcast. Today we have Drew Gilon. Drew and I travel together as roommates this whole season fishing Toyota's Invitational's, some Toyota series last year. Just a quick brief on Drew we both fish college. Drew is still in college and already has $160,000 in earnings from MLF. He's had a giant year and I think it'd be safe to say that me and him have learned a lot together. We share information and really have learned from each other and with each other this season. Basically, we are going to go through kind of what it's been like fishing our first year on the Invitational's and Drew's amazing season. What's going on, drew?
Speaker 2:What's up, dude? I'm excited to talk. It's different, though, because most podcasts you do are with people you kind of know, or you sort of know, but not really. It's a little bit more like an interview and this just feels like a phone call that's been recorded, yeah pretty much.
Speaker 1:Drew and I have these hour long conversations about random fishing topics all the time. Absolutely, we probably have 20 podcasts by now with plenty of information. Absolutely. How's school? You just moved into Campbellsville.
Speaker 2:So I'm doing it online, so I am currently in the comfort of my own home. But, yeah, class started this week. The first half of this semester is going to be pretty unfortunate, so I got six classes this semester and I have five next semester to make sure I get my degree on time. The first three this half are like finance, and I've got an advanced statistics course and I got an international business course. So it's not fun so far, and I'm only a weekend, so I don't think it's going to get any better.
Speaker 1:That's great. Did you say you have five classes in the spring? That's going to be tough if we have another schedule, like we did this year.
Speaker 2:I had six in the spring this last year. Really, I guess you do the kind of the A block, b block, yeah I mean I had three classes the first half of this semester and two in the second in the spring.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's not like you're doing them all at the same time. Anyway, wow, wow, that's good.
Speaker 2:But with my time management skills I'm sure I'll end up being on the wrong side of it in spring.
Speaker 1:Hey, that's fine, though I mean, as long as you pass, all you got to do is graduate.
Speaker 2:It's a good thing I don't do as tackle as long as you do, because if I did, I wouldn't pass.
Speaker 1:You know, I just get no sleep is what that amounts to.
Speaker 2:That's a fact. I don't know how you do it.
Speaker 1:I actually set in this office today for like three or four hours organizing tackle and my goal next year is to be more organized so I can be a little bit more speedy with my tackle.
Speaker 2:So I don't know how many of you know this or if he goes into it. He probably doesn't go into it because ultimately it's kind of monotonous, but this man does tackle consistently the day before events for probably an aggregate what like eight to 11 hours in total, eight to, I mean, if you can, I'm sitting in my boat bare minimum, six bare minimum.
Speaker 1:Well you know, actually, if you're talking about our day off, I agree because, because I can sit there in my boat and just know that I don't have to get it done very soon. You know, because we start in the mornings, do it throughout the afternoon, even with the Toyotas like at grand.
Speaker 2:You were out there the night between day two and day three until what at least like 1145.
Speaker 1:Probably probably.
Speaker 2:And it was cold.
Speaker 1:I mean times like that, though, especially those terms. I was in second place. I mean it would really bother me if I decided my hooks are good enough, oh, my line, it'll be fine.
Speaker 2:I mean for the journey. That's so, that's so important. Yeah, you got everything's too small hooks to line when you're too good to throw an Alabama rig.
Speaker 1:Yeah, pretty much more like it. It moves too fast and five foot of water.
Speaker 2:Oh, man, that's. That was so masterful, though, because I I fished for fish all day long for three days straight, and only caught a lemon out one day out of that whole turn of it, and you had the bites of a limit every single day, which would have put you one of three in that event.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, just barely, I think I got. I got 18 bites in three days, so just enough that I could have had a limit every little bit of fall out though. So let's go ahead and start with, first of all, like how we got to the invitationals, because I just graduated last year and luckily the Toyota season didn't interfere with college schedule, so I was able to fish it and drew. You were the same way, and so we both got to fish the invitationals last year, both made the championship, both made a top 10 in the championship, and we get invited, although they had to extend extra invites beyond what is normally. We've both got invited and I think we can both say that we were both excited and confident that we could compete because of how much we've learned in college fishing even yeah, absolutely Even in even two and a half years, or what yours was at that point. I mean, the amount of free fishing that we get to do through college is pretty insane really.
Speaker 2:Unbelievable, it's truly extraordinary. I mean it's the biggest, the biggest factor in why anglers are getting so good so fast anymore. You know there's guys like Marshall Robinson and Trey McKinney that are the anomalies. But you know so many of the guys that you see pumping out into the Toyotas and invitations and the Opens and I mean so many of the anglers that we see that are showing up and having success is because they've been enriching for two, three, four years in college fishing before making that jump. And I mean when you get to fish 10, 12, 15 events a year on someone else's dollar and you get to fail on their money that many times, eventually, if you're meant to do this, your edge is going to get pretty honed in three or four years.
Speaker 2:And you're going to come out of it with the experience that people used to have to struggle and pinch pennies to pay for. Now you're coming out with a degree, which is an expensive side effect, but you're coming out with a degree and a ton of experience in three or four years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that any making it to the professional level, semi pro level, whatever it takes to get to that next level of fishing is it always amounts to experience. So for a lot of people it's fishing the coangular side. For a lot of really good anglers Now it's fishing college, and I think that college is the easiest way to have the confidence and figure it out, money wise, to be able to fish at the next level. Because, for example, well, in Campbellsville, andrew, that I fished at, they pay for our expenses. We don't have to pay anything. We don't have to pay for school and, like you said, it's pretty expensive.
Speaker 1:But we're at other schools that are kind of a club team or in by themselves they have fundraisers that helps them pay for it. But if you're fishing, you know these $1,700 tournaments without the experience and you go for one season and you lose that all that money. You know, for example, it's really hard to keep doing it. It's really hard to like keep gaining experience when you really need it. So I think that really amounts to experience, especially like for me, but you can tell that from a lot of college anglers because I mean the college anglers right now all across country.
Speaker 1:a lot of them own local areas. Yeah and yeah, lots of, lots of guys.
Speaker 2:Briar Chambers and Brody Robinson winning everything around the house at Gunnersville.
Speaker 1:Right and typically and typically for me owning the Herring Lakes, I mean yeah, and when you think about like local sticks, for example in the Tennessee River because Briar wins, I don't know how many tournaments year a lot.
Speaker 2:Every time that happens, it is every time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think of like guys that are seasoned, you know they're probably in their 40s or 50s and they know every little sneak hole out there on the Tennessee River. But that's not the case. I mean, these guys are just good at finding bass 100%.
Speaker 2:I mean, college fishing is such a wonderful attribute If you're already planning on going to college to learn really rapidly because you're dealing with the expenses. You know you're dipping your toe in it because, as a boater, you're dealing with the expenses of the boat, you know all the equipment a lot of times vehicle expenses, which camels will have to worry about but you know you're dipping your toe in the expense category but you're not going full in. You know you're not paying an exorbitant entry fee, you're not paying gas, you're not paying hotels and you're not paying food, which is the most massive portion of the expenses for this journey. And so you know, and the other thing, that is, you know a detriment in college fishing, but also is something that you really got to look at as one of the biggest side effects as to why college anglers are so good is the fact that the payouts aren't big. And here's the thing is like we see that and we complain. We're like, oh man, the payouts suck. Every tournament, except for the MLF national championship, payouts suck. And we look at that and we're like, man, it sucks. We're not fishing for a big payout, but here's the thing when you get into the Toyotas, you get into the invitations and you get into big payout margins. So we're talking 25% of the field, 33% of the field.
Speaker 2:People start laying up a lot more often. You know it's. They do a lot of strategic decisions to catch just enough, and so that leads to sometimes the lack of learning, because you're going and you are falling on your sword to make sure you secure the money you need to keep it going, and in college that doesn't happen because you get a lot of guys that have one thing on the line and it's price. That's it. And all these guys are fishing just to look cool in every event. And what looks cooler than going out either swinging and catching a big bag?
Speaker 2:Or here, in the same sob story we hear in the captions and that I used whenever I fell on my face at St Lawrence a couple of weeks ago, which is, I went down swinging. Everyone in college fishing is swinging and it's why we see stupid stuff like what the Messers did at the Harris chain in 2022 happened, where they catch 36 pounds because everyone's doing so much insane stuff that they get really dialed on what their deal is. Very well, because they're allowed to go out and fail consistently and still get to do it. Name another part of fishing where you can fail consistently and you still get to do it. There's not another branch of fishing on a national level where you can fail consistently and continue to do what you do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. And, like, I like the example that's used at Harris chain last year because there was a MLF one day tournament and then two weeks later was the Bassmaster two day tournament, in both in February I believe, and there was a lot of these guys that fish that MLF tournament and just stay down there or they practice for you know, a week or a week and a half total. And so a lot of these guys, like the guys that got first and second, they both found these giant schools of fish and caught mega bags because they just graft around and didn't stop until they found them and there's nothing that beats time on the water for one. And so you have a massive fields that we have already and gosh you put it with yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And you put it with like you said. It's just like a strictly pride deal, like everyone wants to beat everyone else. It's pretty cutthroat. Everyone will steal your spots.
Speaker 2:Um the cultures. It's crowd control.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you catch a big fish and someone is around, you guarantee they will be there the next day, because all I'm gonna do is catch the biggest fish that they can. They don't care if you like them. I like you no it doesn't matter, which you know is unfortunate because there is, like a Bassmaster, the past couple of years it's 250 boat fields and that often fills up a lake really fast.
Speaker 2:The worst example I saw of it on last year's schedule was at Norfolk. Oh my goodness, that place was a pain because we had 260 boats on a place. That's what like really the navigable portion of Norfolk that everybody was fishing like 27, 28 miles long total Not huge, not huge.
Speaker 2:No, and not not big enough for that. So for you know a fishery, you know obviously this is relative. You know places like St Claire or whatever that are really you know have a ton of surface area that's fishable is different. You know these big grass fisheries like semi chain, but really for managing a field size wise you got to have you know max for a comfortable size of fishery and length to to the field ratio. Really you got to have about five boats per mile of the fishery is about as as much as you can have for a place to feel comfortable. And that's past anything. Past that starts stretching the limits of what's comfortable and what's not. And there's a few places that break that rule. You know St Claire does um, because semi chain, harris chain can can, uh, depending on the grass growth and uh, some of the herring lakes, hartwell, clarks Hill Clarks Hill was one this year that really was surprising but um, places that spread out boats really well.
Speaker 1:Right, which, speaking of places that spread out boats a lot, our schedule on the invitations this year I don't know how much we averaged per tournament, but it every single place we went was a massive fishery. It was and it was a lot to break down, but it also spread out the field. But what's crazy is oftentimes you know a lot of the guys in the top 10 are fishing the same area or the same creed.
Speaker 2:So that would cross.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly Same pool. Um, you know whatever it is like that happens. But um, let's go straight into the invitationals year. I'm a little bit off at Okeechobee and I finished in the 72nd. You finished 65th um Clarks Hill 110th. This is the most down that I have ever seen drew in my life. He was pretty upset after this tournament.
Speaker 2:I'd say that the pinnacle of it had to be after two days of practice at Ufala. After the second day of practice at Ufala. My level of love for bass fishing, was that an all time low? I mean it was. It was just such a so.
Speaker 1:So let's see In practice. At Clarks Hill, day three. Uh so Drew and I were like trying to figure out. It's February, it's a herring lake, like we're going to find suspended fish, and we both practice the crap out of it and we both caught fish, but it wasn't anything phenomenal. It was like, it was like okay a lot of spots, a lot of like two pounders, but but it wasn't even like a lot of fish Like you would not to see.
Speaker 2:It was like a moderate amount of fish, not like because sometimes you get such a quantity of fish that you feel like you can pick through them and eventually you're going to catch a good bag because that's how many fish you're catching but it was just enough to feel like I could catch like 10 or 11 pounds a day fishing for suspended fish, and there that wasn't even close to cutting it.
Speaker 1:All right. Yeah, I mean they they caught too much weight in that event. And so day three, uh, we both start, we like transition to the shallow fishing and both found like a lot of fish in the very backs of pockets and creeks and I mean I got a lot of my bites on a, on a buzz bait. I know you caught a big one on a mag draft and it was like okay, like this is, this is pretty good, there's a decent amount of fish. We saw some big ones. And then going into the tournament, what was your mindset of where fish and shallow this tournament and how did that turn out?
Speaker 2:So my last day of practice at Clarksville had the bites you know voted a four and a half. Uh, caught a six on a mag graft. Um, caught a three and change on a pot.
Speaker 1:I forgot that fish was that big.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was and I saw it bite it like it was in eight inches of water and I throw my magraft up over the stick and reel it and I see a flash.
Speaker 2:I'm like, oh, I got one minute jumps and I I was flabbergasted but I found four or five areas, like you know, back sections of either major creeks or a couple of little rivers on the lake that, had you know, you'd pull in, you'd fish down a stretch for, like you know, four or five minutes and you'd throw your buzz bait over a lay down and at one point, you know, I took a hook off it and they jump all over it and you'd go off and you'd drop a dot and I found four of these air, four or five of these areas where I pulled in, got a bite like that, and so it's going into the tournament, going you know one of these places.
Speaker 2:I'm going to pull up and it's going to pan out. I'm going to catch two or three, you know, three, four or five pounders in a hurry and then whatever else I have on top of that, it's not going to really matter, because I was catching my magraft and a black buzz bait, 50 something degree water and like it was, I mean, ideal scenario for catching big, pre spawn fish around like shallow wood cover. The water was up, it was off colored and it was a warm week.
Speaker 2:Very warm week, is what? Seventies in February? That was nice, so they should they should have been on their way.
Speaker 1:They should have been like replenishing every day, basically for fish, a way of moving up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know, really felt like, with the weather staying hot and you know the water staying up and staying dirty, that I was going to be able to catch a big bag and that just never formulated. I caught. I caught 10 pounds a day in that tournament and the first day I caught 11 pounds. My biggest fish was a spotted bass on a shad wrap on a bridge and I caught four of my five fish on a buzz bait and still only had 11 pounds in February. Tell me when, if you're catching them on top one in February, when are you ever going to catch less than like 15 pounds if you get five bites? Never happens, definitely doesn't happen in practice, but not a bit. It sure happened and I mean the wheels just fell off. I thought I could maybe go and scrounge up 14 or 15 pounds second down bridges. That definitely didn't happen. It was just. It was a train wreck of old train wrecks.
Speaker 1:I believe it was the opposite. On day two, because it was warm, let's see, travis Harriman caught a big bag on a bridge on day one, and you actually got to see one of those fish Watch and catch a five pounder heckin Travis.
Speaker 1:As he's idling under the bridge. And then I was talking to him about it and he said on day two he actually didn't even catch him on the bridge, he caught him further back in that creek. So it's like that school had moved from the bridge, like they were going back to spawn. So but I mean, how do you supposed to know that after you?
Speaker 2:struggle on day one.
Speaker 1:I mean, how are you supposed to keep up with fish that you're not on? You know?
Speaker 2:And so that that creek me and Travis were in on day one. He fished the bridge on day one and I was going to fish on the way in but he was there, so I just titled to the back. I caught one. I caught a four on a buzz bait in the back of this creek in practice and I was like you know, it's full of willow trees, full of bushes. I'm going to come back here and I'm going to pick it apart and I'm going to catch a couple of big ones.
Speaker 2:I went back there, had one bite and it was like I reeled my chatter bait past the willow bush and it just squeaked sideways and I pull and there's just nothing there. One of those bites where you know it's a big one and there's just absolutely nothing you can do about it. And I mean there is, if I threw a chatter bait more, I would have hooked that fish and landed it. I don't throw a chatter bait very much and so I was, like you know, when it started going sideways I was like oh, the blade's not turning, like an idiot, and then I just came off. And so day two I was like I'm not, I'm not going back there, and and I got up there and got to fish the bridge and then lost a giant one and yeah my.
Speaker 2:The wheels just fell apart. I mean, I was faced down on the front deck by 9am and it never really looked up from there for the rest of the day.
Speaker 1:So after this, after this tournament, and you were down, we had some conversations about 80 points. We had some conversations about shallow fishing. So at that point, because this definitely leads on to the rest of the season, what was your thought on being able to catch shallow fish, especially, especially this time of year when they're up around cover?
Speaker 2:Yeah, like my. My thought was, like you know what? I just need to dirty fisheries and stuff like this. I just need to learn how to do it. I was like you know, I really need to to just dive, take a deep dive into shallow fishing and my innermost thoughts about shallow fishing, and then we rolled into you Fala.
Speaker 1:Wait a second, wait a second. Something at Clarks Hill you were saying was I can't, I can't think like that, I can't do it. I can't just mindlessly shallow fish, and I think that was like the hardest hump Mentally that you were trying to get over is I can't just mentally go around and throw it what I don't know. If there's fish on or not, yeah, which I agree, because everybody's like that. Now you know, like Everyone's not gonna be necessarily just lost without life scope, but you're gonna still, you're gonna be staring down at your foot all day because like, oh, it's a habit to see something.
Speaker 1:You know whether it's a little piece of cover, or just the depth dream?
Speaker 2:And the thing about it is are you know our sport is is not the same sport. It was 10 years ago or even five years ago and it's not necessarily. You know the cut and dry answers. Old life scopes changed it and it has. But necessity is the mother of invention. There's a reason we have life scope. It's because our fisheries keep getting more difficult and we have to invent something to overcome that. Because the issue is is if you take forward-facing sonar away, you totally change the aspect of all of these major tournaments all year and you drop the average weights at every event. I I would bet the average weight drop across the board at every event all season would drop by probably Three to three and a half pounds across the board in every event all year if you took away forward-facing sonar.
Speaker 2:Because the thing about it is it used to be easier to catch them just going down the bank and fishing at what you see, or trying to Improvise, because you used to be able to improvise and oh, you know, I want to go fish. This lay down and you were the first one to fish that lay down that day. And now we have fields of. You know, back in the day there were fields of 50 60 boats in the locals were out there in canoes and paddle boats, throwing Cane poles, because they were out there trying to catch something to eat, or they were fishing with very primitive bass fishing technology. That, you know, isn't even something I would put technology to now and now you know, anytime you're trying to fish the bank, you're competing with a hundred, fifty to two hundred tournament boats, as well as all the locals who, as far as fishing the bank goes, are just as skilled and just as prepared equipment wise as you are.
Speaker 2:And and fishing the bank is something. It's it's why the guys that can do it well are such an anomaly and it's it's why that I really feel like the guys that do it well Can't have a say in this sort of argument, because there's something mystical about what they do that is so specific to them. Because of you know the way that our sport has changed, they see it as being such a simple, tangible thing. But ultimately, for you to consistently do well in the bank, short of a miracle, you have to be able to Understand them in a way that very few other people do, because the bank is way harder than it used to be.
Speaker 1:You used to be well in and you always hear guys, which is this true, that it's easier to find shallow fish, but it's harder to catch them.
Speaker 1:It's easier to, or it's harder to, find deep fish, but it's easier to catch the deeper fish, which I agree, because there's a lot of factors about presenting your bait, not scaring them away in fish that are in two foot of water.
Speaker 1:And there's, I think, two things that I notice in common about really good shallow anglers and it's that well, I'm taking into consideration the guys that are on the top tours is that all of them throw a spinning rod a lot more than everyone thinks they do, and they're all very, very observant fishermen to where they know if the birds are chirping around them, they see any little swirl in the water. I hear so many those guys say, oh, I just like saw this little fin underneath the bush and I threw up there and worked a fish on a bed that I didn't even see and caught like six pounder. You know, I mean that happened. A guy darn now, I mean he had like 23 pounds or something and it was all fish that dirt, dirt water. You know, it's just barely see the fin hanging out of the water and I think that that's actually similar to how you and I fish and Cope with our competitive Fields out deep. It's that looking for those little pieces of cover or noticing, like the subtle differences and.
Speaker 1:I think that that makes a huge deal, like for example for me on Kentucky Lake. There's so like if you see a lay down on the bottom on life scope, it doesn't stick up hardly at all, you just see like a shadow on the body.
Speaker 2:I mean if you think about it, you know a big lay down is gonna be that big around right and in your mind that you're like, wow, that's a big log. But on life scope you tilt it this way. You know how tall that is off the bottom 15, 16 inches. Is a big log in 15 16 inches off the bottom on life scope. Rarely it doesn't look like a whole lot.
Speaker 1:No, and especially because that lasts like especially like 10, 12, 15 inches Kind of blurs into the bottom and it's different based on what kind of bottom composition you have. But yeah, it kind of like fuzz is into the bottom and so like you can tuck your leg. I think I weighed in three or four of my keepers in the tournament off those logs that you can barely see. But most people are going around looking for giant brush piles or they're looking for like obvious things and I mean like reality.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean late pointing. They're looking for a school of like 50 fish when you reality you're looking for like one to three fish, most of time like the best pieces of cover that I always find are Rarely bigger than five feet. You know it's in stumps.
Speaker 2:There'll be a couple big dogs Always the best, yeah exactly. We don't talk about stumps. Don't talk about it. Don't fish big concrete blocks either, doesn't?
Speaker 1:resemble stumps or toilets. You know you don't want to fish those.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, truman, there's a cemetery, isn't there somewhere out in the lake?
Speaker 1:I'm sure there is probably 80 feet deep.
Speaker 2:They live 80 feet deep at Sherman.
Speaker 1:There's one 80 feet deep table rock might be a hundred. Well, it's pretty deep. So something interesting that we were just talking about before we we hopped on here is MLF posted a podcast clip of them talking to Keith Carson about Tours banning life scope, just like they did with a rig, and one comment that he made was that if one tour was to take away Life scope, then he thought they would be the most watched tour by far, because it's more fun to watch guys that aren't looking down at their screen. Now I I do agree that it's fun to watch. You know, guys flip into a bush and hold bush shakes and they they pull a fish out or a fishy to frog, yeah, but there are so many tournaments that they don't do that. The guys are still fishing offshore. Offshore fishing is not a new thing. It's just how effectively we can now do it.
Speaker 2:And a comment I saw in that post was it said. They said smallmouth fishing has become so monotonous that I can't hardly watch it now. Here's the thing what has changed from a viewer's perspective about smallmouth fishing in the last 10 years?
Speaker 2:Absolutely I invite you to say something, because nothing has changed, and that's the biggest issue at this debate is guys are trying to, they're grasping at straws To try and get this sort of technology to go away, when the issue is is that, ultimately, the bank fishermen aren't making the argument that the bank is awesome or the bank is super good. They're making the argument that they want to fish the bank. They want to compete on the bank and they know that. You know, with the amount of pressure that we have and with how much the bank sucks, now the bank doesn't play anymore for a reason. It's not because guys suck at fishing the bank, it's because the bank sucks.
Speaker 2:If the bank didn't suck, people would be fishing the bank, but they don't, and so, like the biggest issue is is people would rather be miserable and would rather catch less fish, doing it the way that they've always done it. Then adapt and do it a new way to enjoy it, have fun and and catch big bags, because the thing is, if you take it away, the weights across the board would absolutely catastrophically plummet, because our fisheries aren't the same fisheries we had 15 years ago when Kevin was doing it with side, because that's the argument they use. Oh well, kevin did it with side scan, kevin did it with down scan. Our fisheries were different back then.
Speaker 1:They wore he was. He was one of two people Anywhere that was doing that, and so the fish that you were fine that he was finding had not been fished for. They had not seen a big crankbait Just ripped through him consistently like he did with those fish.
Speaker 2:That's why I hold to.
Speaker 1:That's why that was his most dominant period too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and ultimately, you know and I can see the perspective, you know I understand Keith's perspective and some of the viewers perspective it's fun to watch somebody go throw a frog over a mat like lacrosse and watching the hole open up in the duck Wean watching a black one. But ultimately we've got to accept that that's not the world we live in anymore. What we're gonna be watching is we're gonna be watching guys do that and instead of you know it, lacrosse this year for our tournament, for example, instead of 16 and change winning, we're gonna go to watching 13 and three quarters, 14 a day win and somebody's gonna be, you know, throwing a frog to catch Seven or eight fish a day where we could have been doing what they were doing and throwing. You know finesse techniques and catching 2530 fish and being able to catch 15, 16 pounds consistently at lacrosse with only two hours to fish. That's never been done. I mean, that place is one where it's it's about fishing time, it's about making casts, it's about getting as many opportunities to put a high, two, three pounder in the boat as possible.
Speaker 2:And now, with what we're Understanding about this technology, we're able to tap into bites that we've never been able to tap into before and enjoy what we're doing. Dustin Connell made a comment on that post that I had to reply to because Dustin said 20% of the fish on any given fishery live on the bank At a given time. In 80% we've been able to tap into due to technology. And why would we want to go back to beating the bank? It allows us to enjoy what we're doing because ultimately was created for a purpose to put more bass in the boat and to allow us to understand what we're doing. And you know, it's been a big part of why I've been able to catch up to a lot of people that have come from bass fishing mechas, coming from Illinois and only getting into this as a junior in high school. I wouldn't be where I am today if I didn't have the ability to use a technology that allows me to put the time in and understand bass.
Speaker 2:But hey, without that technology, I would be miles behind everyone else, and it allows people like me to catch up. And that's the problem is, we have so many people that have so much experience Putting you know, putting forward the idea that, oh for, facing technology is bad or it's unnecessary, because ultimately they know that it's. It's the biggest way that people that are coming from behind, or young people Can catch up with the amount of knowledge and the wealth of knowledge that they have through experience, by just putting the time in and learning how bass act.
Speaker 1:Right and I think I think this is what we're just talking about is the strongest argument against what he said about most people watching the tour with no life scope. And keep Carson wonderful dude, and he's actually he's actually, he's actually good at life scoping. When they go up north for Smallmouth tournaments, dude catches them still.
Speaker 1:But he's a great fisherman all around the thing is is like if you go to any website let's let's take YouTube, for example if you go to the most watched fishing videos that there is there all Informational videos. How do I learn how to do this? What is this guy Throwing to catch these fish? What kind of equipment is gonna make me better? And that's why you have so many guys that watch professional fishermen. It's not, it's not only for the enjoyment of seeing them set the hook right. It's because they want to learn.
Speaker 1:And so what does life scope do? It helps you learn where the fish are, how to catch them, how they react, debates, what percentage of the time you can actually get those fish to bite. Like dude, I throw a drop shot and finesse worm more than ever, and a little Domingue rig because it Gets those fish to bite the highest percentage of the time, no matter the size of the fish, right, so you don't have to go through a big bait to catch big fish now. And One thing that I think that will help a tour dominate is if every live camera that they put on MLF or the elite series or MPFO could even do this. But it would be to have side-by-sides of their Ford-facing sonar screens so you can watch what they're watching.
Speaker 1:You can see those fish chasing their baits, you can see what they're throwing at, because I agree, like if you're watching a smallmouth tournament, you have no idea what they're doing. They could be fishing a little rock pile, they could be in hundred foot of water chasing schooling fish. Yeah, you don't know. You're just looking at the bank. That's 10 miles away. And what makes it fun? For example, bassmaster posted a couple videos of Cody Huff's Screen because he has garments all around so you could see his life scope screen on the back of the boat and the cameraman would be on that. And there were several clips of 20, 30, 40, 50 bass in a school and he that's If you're a bass fisherman that loves catching big fish.
Speaker 2:There is absolutely no way that you can twist that to say that's not cool. No, that is, that gets me so excited. That gets me so excited just to watch that in like and people don't know that.
Speaker 1:About Shamplain, like you say, all I was chasing Schools of bait around and catching these fish, but they don't know that that means you're in a school of 40 bass and you just caught a four and a half pounder out of it. I mean that's insane For a lot of people to see that, especially guys that don't have life scope or just you know, don't get the fish up north like it's a different animal, but it's insane to see that. And what does that teach you about bass behavior? You know that's a flat bottom for miles, so, and there's in, I would say, a huge thing that I've learned about any lake in the country is how many fish lives suspended All but a week or two out of the year. Like those smallmouth, they never see the bottom, they don't care where the bottom is, they're looking up and they only look up. They're chasing that bait around. Yeah, and that's the thing too, is that so many of these people are like.
Speaker 2:You know I wouldn't want. I hate watching the back of some dudes head while he stares the TV screen while he's fishing. But here's the goal put as many big ones in the boat as possible in the shortest amount of time as possible. And guess what? All of these people that are saying I hate watching this or I hate, I can't stomach watching this all day Guess what they're gonna be doing when we, as tournament anglers, handicap ourselves by not using this technology. All of these locals that are fishing are not fishing, they're fishing for the fish. They're fishing for the fish and around us will still be using it and they will be murdering these, these, what we call ourselves Professionals, because we've chosen to handicap ourselves in the use of technology. And now we're making ourselves miserable while everyone around us gets to have fun just for the sake of Watching someone catch 12 pounds. But instead of looking like this, they're looking like this really yeah, yeah, a lot of it what changes 90%?
Speaker 2:of?
Speaker 1:yeah, that's it. That's the only thing, and a lot of those guys are hypocritical that are commenting. Crappy things about it. I mean it's yeah, it's ridiculous.
Speaker 2:But and the month. The money argument is really Because if you want to go into high-level bass fishing $2,500 is not gonna break you.
Speaker 1:No, yeah, but Everybody's, everybody's like argument is all. I'm gonna have to spend 80 or 100 grand to compete against these guys, I'm gonna have to sell a kidney or a child dude all.
Speaker 1:But let's say Three or four percent of that money has changed. Less than five percent. It's it's dude. $2,500 compared to $80,000 Doesn't compare one bit. You can go buy a $30,000 boat and Spend less than half the money and put life scope on it and fully compete, the same way that these guys are saying 100%. You don't have to have a brand new boat like these professional anglers have. They're just doing it because they can. If they didn't get free boats, they wouldn't have all new boats, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it is yeah it's.
Speaker 1:That's one of the worst arguments that I hear.
Speaker 2:For sure it's it's just it's people being reluctant to change but still want to stay competitive. That would be like if somebody wanted to compete in Major League Baseball as as a right-handed pitcher. But they say, no, I want to throw in the 80s. Let's handicap the speed that people can throw to 85 miles per hour because ultimately I'm not willing to do what's necessary to gain that extra velocity, because I don't enjoy the work, I don't enjoy putting in the time, but I still want to compete throwing a top end of 85. That's not how it works. If you want to compete, you have to do what's necessary to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. And if I think that if you go and buy life scope I Mean it's it's not very much to win $2,500 throughout the entirety of a year, between making checks you might win a tournament or two in the whole year that pays for it. And now you're breaking even and say you didn't have life scope and you didn't make any money. You're still at the same point by breaking even with whatever it is. So I think that's how I justify like electronics or buying the massive amount of baits and tackle that we do to compete on the highest level. You have to do that kind of stuff to keep up, but if it helps you make an extra $500 and you spent $500, do it. That's totally worth it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's. It's just ironic because it would be as if Doing a bat flip decreased your likelihood of hitting a home run. But I want to see guys do bat flips. So I want to see less dingers throughout the year because I want to see bat flips. How stupid is that. I want to see more home run. I don't care if they can't flip the bat or showboat as they run around the bases. I Want to see more home runs. I want to see more fish kitchen and I want to see bigger bags caught in the year before. In the only way that's possible anymore is with forward-facing sonar.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%, 100%, which that leads on to Going into the third invitation over the year. You're pretty down about shallow fishing. We're going to you follow huge I Guess not huge small population of big fish. It's a huge lake that has a small population, kind of condensed in the world saying I'm out of water.
Speaker 1:Insane amount of water. You really have to stay on the low lower end of the lake unless you just know that there's. You know one place has fish in it but Going into this practice, we're still riding that low from Clarks Hill.
Speaker 2:I'm right. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Yeah, you have Clarks Hill, followed by Grand Lake, you and then to you follow, followed by was Dardanelle, after you follow. No, it was before, it was before. You follow, because we went straight from you. Follow the Kentucky Lake. I'm not sure, I think you fish Dardanelle before you follow April we're weaker to April 4th through the 6th. Yeah, it was, yeah, yeah so you're right, in Clarks Hill great before now. So I am riding the misery train.
Speaker 2:Cole, that's off of a top 25 and two top 10s of toy. So man's love in life.
Speaker 1:I'm here in.
Speaker 2:Lake you follow in absolute misery because I am now coming off of two of the worst finishes in my tournament career and and I show up and have the first two days of practice are just absolutely miserable, like when I say it's miserable like a fish a day official day, like maybe keepers. Yeah, like well, the first day I caught like an almost three on a bullshad, and the second day Like little pieces of wood in the back of pockets.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you can find a piece of wood in the water. You get two and a half, three and a half pounder off it. There's like five in the whole lake and the first day practice Go pulls up and catches 17 pounds with a five pound smallmouth just dragging a tube down the bank on stuff that looks like everything else.
Speaker 1:Well, it was a little. It was like a little, honestly, look like a little rock ledge. It was like a little scene that came out on a gravel bank and I was like dude, I caught that fish and I was like it's about to be on. And then the next day I find this rock pile, actually on Google Earth, and it's got, you know, these couple big boulders on it and I throw up there and I like real, my line tight and one just absolutely smokes it. And I wasn't setting the hook at this point anymore, but it was just pure instinct, I was not paying attention, so I just I whacked this one. I set the hook and ended up being like a six and a half pounder or six, I can't remember how big it was. So I don't know. I was feeling pretty good after the first two days of practice, but then What'd you figure out on day three?
Speaker 2:because Practice I so in the afternoon I'm like, screw it. I'm like I'm done with this. I'm done with this shallow fishing garbage. I'm done with this hole. You know, let's. Let's fish what feels right trash. I'm like I'm just gonna spend the last five hours practice staring at my screen, pull up in a place down like that has the right watercolor for what I'm trying to do. So it's one of the few places where it was even possible and I pull up on the first secondary point that I want to look at and I drop it. I'm scanning. I'm scanning car Is.
Speaker 1:This was just like a just like a steeper bank or like flatter gravel or yeah, this is.
Speaker 2:This is like 45 degree angle.
Speaker 1:So it wasn't steep and it was a little chunkier though.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, chunky stuff. I pull up on it, I'm scanning Carp, catfish, carp, catfish. And then I see one. I'm like that's, I don't think that's, I don't think that's catfish. I pitch my pitch, my worm out there drops down. You know same stuff I was doing that tournament drops down its face Tunk. I like please don't be a drone, please don't be a drone. Oh, it was a three and a half pounder and I was like this is pretty awesome. Pull up on the second. It was a main light point, second place to pull up on and it's somewhere that I had fished previous in practice that looked good, that I just didn't catch any. I, you know I threw a crankbait over it or whatever didn't catch any there. I'm like okay, it looks too right to not have one pull up. Look across it. There's a big dot on like three or four isolated rocks. I'm like are you kidding me? It's like five, six feet deep fish. My worm up there, four and a half pounder, and I'm like, oh my gosh. I'm like this is this is cool.
Speaker 1:So I think you call you called me at this point immediately. You're like dude dude you never guess what just happened. I just figured them out. I'm on them now.
Speaker 2:Yeah and so I and so me and Cole proceed to run this for like the last four or five hours of practice and both of us like got just an exorbitant amount of bites on. I was, I was just throwing that same seven inch worm that I threw in the tournament and I put on a screw lock and I bet I shook off like 20 in the last three, four hours practice and so I went from just like down and out to I was catching. You know I was getting a lot of bites from and these fish should not have been pre spawned, like the water was high 60s and they've still not spawned yet because the water's so low and and it had just come down to.
Speaker 1:it was up a little bit and had come down, so that's probably the main factor.
Speaker 2:And these fish are still like super pale pre spawners. They're big but they're shallow. They're like two to six feet and I like I can go down a stretch and, and you know, shine down it and Carp, catfish, carp, catfish, drum, catfish, carp, and then you see one that's swimming just right, and you pitch in front of it. And I mean it. It wasn't like I, I couldn't tell every single time, but you know I I probably weeded out 80% of the carp and catfish and drum and pitched it the other 20%, just to you know, make sure they weren't bass, because sometimes the bass will swim with the others but Ended up getting on that deal. And then the first day I go out I'm like, alright, here's the go. I want to catch like 15, 16 pounds. I think I can do that with what I'm on.
Speaker 2:Pull up on my first stretch, don't catch anything. Second stretch Don't catch anything. Third stretch I pull up right where I caught a three and a half pounder In practice, first one I caught on this deal and I pull up on it and I see a fish right where that fish was and I'm like that's about, pitch my arm up there, drops down to it, don't I get it like all the way up to the troll motor. It comes off I like. Oh my god.
Speaker 1:You see it.
Speaker 2:I'm like really, yeah, yeah, I saw it flash. And then it comes off. Now, like, are you serious? And so I back up, re-rig my worm and I like, while I'm doing this I'm staying you know, staying on the fish, whatever. Watch her swim around, re-rig my worm, pitch it out in front of her. She falls into the bottom, don't? And this time I got her. It was a three nine to start the day and I was like, okay, yeah, I've got a good one in the box. Let's, let's get to going.
Speaker 2:Run down to the last creek for the dam, pull in on one of those pea gravel stretches and I had a pea gravel stretch at like a couple big rocks on, and I only saw one there in practice. But I pull up on it. I actually pull up further down on it because there's somebody fishing the higher end of the stretch. So I pulled up about 400 yards away from the drop troll motor and I see one little stick I'm talking. This stick is like this tall and maybe this wide and it's just single stick and I see a big dot behind it. I like, know it, pitch my worm up there and this dot just slithers straight up, catches it. It's four, two. And so, first, two, I catch her, a three, nine to four, two. I'm like this is, this is awesome.
Speaker 2:And so I run up to another creek. After catching that one, I actually caught a keeper spot. And then, uh, you know, so I had three in the box. And then I run up to another creek, pull up on one stretch where I shook off a big one. Right where I shook, shook off the big one. Uh, in practice, pull up, throw out there. I see her fall it down. Donk Zzz, 410. Go around the corner. Another stretch looks just like it, um, fishing toward Cal Lane. We're just talking, being Cal are talking. See a big one comes swimming off a rock. Pitch my worm up there, falls it down, donk four, five. So at this point, I'm like 18 and change.
Speaker 2:And so I'm like you know this, this is ridiculous. My smallest fish was like a high two, and so I'm like, okay, I need to. And so I pump the brakes and I was like I'm not sticking any more of these fish. This is you follow Oklahoma, where if I stick one more fish, that is one less fish I'm gonna catch the next day. And I don't know that I can play Risky bats with one or two fish on that place.
Speaker 2:So I start, I can just pull up in the first pocket. I see I'm like let's start practicing, pull up in this pocket. I'm going between docks, whatever. Pull up and I see two fish or two things Like swimming a foot under the surface and two feet of water and like I can see a dirt cloud and it looks like, um, the way they're swimming and the way they're acting, the way they're throwing dirt around. I'm like these are turtles, like this is two spawning turtles. And I'm like, but you know what, just for the sake of pitching, I pinch my worm up there. As soon as it hits the water, uh, one spooks and the other one just goes straight down to it. I'm like Might be turned. I don't know, I've never had a turtle bite it off the bottom. It goes, tunk and it was like two feet of water. So I go. The first thing it does is jump, and it was a 411.
Speaker 2:And I ended up culling my high tooth. At that point I had just I think I had 1912 the first day. That was my whole bag for the first day.
Speaker 1:Which so most of the top 10, or a lot of guys that caught them, actually caught them site fishing, especially days one and two. So I mean that's pretty shallow for a fish to be in a foot and a half or two foot of water, but I think that's how a lot of these fish were like In the water being low. Help those guys see these fish. So I mean everything you're catching was pretty shallow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, everything I caught that week was six feet or so right.
Speaker 2:And then day two I go out and the story of the back half of this tournament is just wind. That is the entire story of day two and day three. And so day two I go out and it by 9 a, by 9 am it's like howling, and when we take off it's already windy like it's. It's rolling Probably two footers down where I was because it's blowing out of the northwest and uh, everything I was fishing was on the south side on the main lake, and a lot of the fish I caught on day one were on the main lake. So I tried to fish my main lake stuff for two hours. Did not get a single bite out there. And then I I like, screw it, I'm, I'm gonna pull in here. You know, I I found a place that I thought was a limit hole and uh, pull in there and I catch a high two, a three, and then uh, couple like 15 inches quick and then I catch like a four and a half, and so I'm like, all right, we're back on track. You know, I've got, I've got like 12 and change. And then I kind of stalled out for a while, went back to trying to fight the wind and fight the main lake and it just did not work. And eventually I bailed on it and I said, you know, I'm gonna Put myself out of the wind in the general vicinity of where I'd been catching all these fish, knowing that even if it didn't set up the way I wanted it set up, you know it's, it's the triangle scenario where if you're Around a high population of fish which for that lake that was a population center If you're around a population center, you don't have to be on the best stuff, you just got to be in that area. And so I pull out of the wind and I'm just throwing. This was so fun fact for you guys. This was one of four fish that I caught all year From okechobi to Clark's hill to youfala, ozarks, um, potomac, miscipey river. This was one of four fish that I did not see on life scope before I caught.
Speaker 2:And I I pull up on this stretch, this pea gravel, do nothing stretch, and I'm looking. But while I'm looking, you know I'm throwing just to keep a line wet and I pitch it up by this walkway and it just goes swimming off 3-5. So now I'm at like low 14s and I'm like you know, that's competitive, that'll keep me in the top 10 going into day three and uh, ran around a little bit more, went to the back of the first creek. You know my limit, whole area. I was like you know I'm gonna go the back, even though that's not what I want to fish, and I go back there. See one, 210, catch it. So now I've got, you know, all two and a half plus pluses and uh, and so I uh Came in with like high 14s after day 14 14 12.
Speaker 2:Yep, and then, uh, so I come in with that and I, at that point, you know I stayed 5th or 6th going into day three and, uh, you know, on the bubble for whether I was gonna get to keep keep camera all day.
Speaker 2:And day three was my, my roughest start all week. I went out, my main lake stuff wasn't firing, my limit hole wasn't happening and uh, you know it's too windy to fish the main lake for the most part, but it was just down enough that some of the stuff that I couldn't fish on day two I could fish in the morning on day three. And so I was like, you know, I'm gonna rush to my stuff and try and fish it the best I can. And I had two stretches that were at the mouth of the creek, that that I caught big ones on on day one, that I couldn't fish on day two because it was too windy, and I pulled up on it. And the first one I pulled up on in that area I catch a, a four, six or four, seven, and I'm like that's awesome, you know.
Speaker 2:I got four plus which, yeah, pull up on the second stretch, which is just adjacent to that. Fish down it, fish down it. One slides off a rock just like one the first day and and I pitched my arm in front of it Three, five, and so I started off the day with with two good ones, like an almost three and a half, and then almost four and a half, and I hit a drought bad. I caught like a high one, ellen, on one of the stretches back there that I fished on day one, caught a couple dinks on and it just hit a wall. And I hit the wall for about two and a half, three hours only caught shorgs, catfish drum, you made it and it was.
Speaker 2:It was looking pretty down and I was like you know what, we're gonna try the the whole triangulation principle in this area. I was like I'm gonna pull up on a stretch that I've not pulled up on. That's near what I want to fish. I'm like this looks like a stupid stretch, let's pull up on it. Pull up on it. First fish. I see, I see, I see. So here's my screen. I see this little bitty dot just swimming at like four or five feet under the surface and 12 feet of water. And then I just see this massive dot slither off the edge of this rock vein and come up at this little dot and just start following it slowly like four feet below the surface. I'm like that's a bastard. There's no way that's not a bastard. It's coming at a pretty decent pace toward the boat. So, like I need to, I need to make a good pitch and I I don't piece it.
Speaker 2:I hit it like 25 feet out. It was 35 feet away from boat coming at me and it gets down to about three feet and this fish just goes it. Like it was one of those fast jolts where you don't even feel for the bite, like you just flip the bail and go, and after three hours of no bites I flip the bail, zinger and immediately jumps and it was a 411. And so I've got four and I, I keep going down this, do nothing stretch. There's a little bitty brush pile pitch.
Speaker 2:My drop shot out there Kitching almost two. So now I've got five. I've got like 16 pounds because I got two big ones, the decent one and two dings. And so at this point I'm like I, how, how on earth in the last hour of the day Am I gonna get these two dinks gone, and I remembered you know, I'm about a mile away from there I had one that I saw on the first day that I I never got to bite. That looked like it was a group of two again, just like that other group, and even though there's a spawn and fish or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, they were like four or five feet deep and I couldn't get them to react right, but they were in like this little nook behind two docks and I was like I bet they're still gonna be there and I'm pretty sure those are bass. But they didn't act right the first day and so I come there on day three. Yep, sure enough these two fish are just swimming around the back of this pocket and uh, so I see them and Pitch my arm up there and both of them immediately gonna goes nose down. I'm like those are like two and a half three pounders. Flip them out, hit it immediately, jumps, almost wraps up the trolling motor 411 again.
Speaker 2:No and so at this point I've got like 18 and change and I'm like you know this, I have totally 180 by dad. I've gone from you know, looking like I was gonna fall the probably 10th to 15th to now I'm like I'm like I'm gonna finish at least in the top four or five and so I'm running down the lake. I'm like you know what this stretch is, one that that looks right, that I didn't really fish well in practice To pull up on it, and there's like 25 keepers on it now they're all things. So I just start burning worms like every cast 14 inch or 15 inch or 14 inch or 16 inch or 14 inch on it too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, 14 inches limit and I catch a couple 12 inches and I'm about to leave and I see one dot that looks like slightly bigger than the rest of these dots on the stupid looking sand point, and I throw my worm at it. Hop it don't, and it was a two and three quarter and ended up getting a high one gone cold by a pound. So took me from whatever add, I think I had like 19, 13 on the last day of that tournament and and rallied and man, if it weren't for Kelly having a magical day, you know that I got really close in that one, but uh, yeah that was extremely close, came in second.
Speaker 1:That was your best finish of the season and he barely got you because he had like a magical. He had a magical day and then he topped it off with a magical like last minute stop, that really did. So it was just that would be like you catching another four and a half pounder in the day, you know yeah, I didn't that, wouldn't even want it at that point.
Speaker 2:You know I needed I needed for one fish to do it. I wouldn't need a five and a half pounder and I didn't catch a single one over five all week at you follow.
Speaker 1:But uh, you know, you follow.
Speaker 2:Was a turning point, not just for my season but for my my intellectual bass fishing decision making, which is that you can do it on forward facing sonar if you were bullheaded enough. You can do it everywhere. And so I went into the next event, me and Cole packed up, went straight to Kentucky lake.
Speaker 1:Well, and and and there's something that is important because drew probably can tell the difference of Abass to anything else more than anybody else. I mean you have to be in the top three of people who can identify fish on life's go because, like you're saying that you follow, like there's a, there was a ton of carp, ton of dry ton of catfish, and those fish typically swim a lot more than bass.
Speaker 2:like bass are going to be more lazy, they're like moving slower, um, but and when bass swim, you know their tail movements stay steady, like it's not like. They go burst burst, burst, glide, burst burst, first glide.
Speaker 1:You know that you know, I'll do that, carp will do that yeah catfish are generally the hardest to throw right. But I mean this right here was definitely, I would say, the defining moment, like you said, for identifying fish and shallow water, and not that that wasn't a part of your game, because I know that You're always going to be looking at life's gop, understanding those fish, but I mean we had a shallow schedule this year, every everywhere besides Park Hill was a deep reservoir with A spawning fish population, so they were up there.
Speaker 1:So we had a shallow water, river, dirty lake schedule and you had those first two events and you follow turned your season around to where you had three out of four top tens and then you made a check in the fourth one. So, dude, from from here on out was just insane. You had a phenomenal season and next tournament was Like those arcs and once you got fourth. But you just did the same thing, pretty much right.
Speaker 2:Similar. I did the same thing we did at Kentucky lake, which was, instead of fishing for, like shallow, cruising around pre spawners, we you know Kentucky lake, me and Cole both had a top right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was the next event, yeah and uh, we went, we went straight from you follow the Kentucky, so it wasn't like there's any downtime, we just pack the intro. And uh, you know, that was. That was where you take the transition from pre spawn to spawn. It's a lot of fish responding and a lot of fish were postponed at the same time, and so that would that one. I kind of was like, all right, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna scope, and uh, I did that and you had a good time that week.
Speaker 1:You won the mainly largemouth tournament.
Speaker 2:I won the largemouth derby. Unfortunately, largemouth was the losing battle that week. Uh, first and second, both, I mean, blew me out of the water by catching smallmouth. But uh, you know, that's. That's one for the memory bank for sure, for potentially next year, hoping, hoping the rumors are correct on that one, but uh, um, so hold on, you had a key catch.
Speaker 1:No, maybe not a key. Well, it was a key catch, but you caught a giant at Kentucky lake. I did.
Speaker 2:It was.
Speaker 1:It was eerily similar to all the fish that you caught at Lake Eufaula.
Speaker 2:It was. It was I. Uh, I pulled up on a round point with chunk rock 45-year-old bank and I see one cruising down it and and mind you, if you've ever been to Kentucky lake, especially modern Kentucky lake, you know that ultimately just seeing fish, a big Profiled fish, cruising down a bank is rarely enough reason to throw at it. But for whatever reason I go, you know what, maybe this was the best. I even verbalized it to my cow. I was like just be a bass. And I pitched my, pitch, my worm out there, dropped down to it. It's in there about seven feet and this fish, like it does what drum do it? Doesn't like bass, you know they perk up their the sharp movements it does. What drum do it? Kind of like turn up slow and then kind of turn and I see it get closer to it slowly and then like I'm expecting to pick up and feel nothing. And I pick up and it, my line just starts going away from me and I went Zzz, and this was a 23 inch fish that weighed 514.
Speaker 1:I mean, which is a whole massive fish.
Speaker 2:I caught that fish and I was like this is seven pounder, like this is a massive, massive fish, and it didn't even make six but it was the biggest frame, one of the biggest frame fish I've ever caught out of Kentucky and it was the same thing as you follow.
Speaker 1:But the rest fish I caught that week were Either that fish was not a wacky or a Niko, or that was a.
Speaker 2:Niko fish. Yeah that was Niko fish, but uh a lot of the fish I caught at Kentucky were wacky fish. You know, fishing for spawners and post spawners. There's not much better than a wacky worm a lot of times.
Speaker 1:No, not not one of that shallow. And then we turn around did the same thing of those orcs, yeah yeah, basically you were just picking off Spawner and post spawner, maybe a couple of prespawners, I don't know they're. They're kind of in that in our range where they're all three. But yeah, just fishing little pieces of cover and you come in fourth place. You caught 1918 and then you had boat troubles the last day, um, and had still had 16 pounds sucked.
Speaker 2:But ultimately, you know, I got to fish for all the fish the last day that I wanted to fish for. So, as much as the boat troubles sucked, ultimately it I got to fish for the ones I wanted to fish for. So, barring finding One or two really big ones that I hadn't already found, which was unlikely because of how much time we both spent looking that week Um, you know, barring some sort of miracle, I still wasn't going to win that event, even with a working boat.
Speaker 2:But it would have been nice to have had all that fishing time, for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, and it's hard to beat, uh, Keith Carson and John Cox and John inside trading blows with four and five pounders the last day. Yeah, it was just crazy to watch those guys catch those freaking. I mean dude, keith Carson the last day caught like a five and a half pounder and watching on a bed. It was like it didn't even look that big really.
Speaker 1:It was like no it's a three, that's a three and a half, might be a four, I mean it's. Then he sets a hook on it and it's like, oh yeah, four pounder maybe, and then he gets it next to the boat and it's like, holy cow, that's a big fish.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of my favorites was watching your your six pounder from Clarks Hill. That was such an awesome fish catch. I mean because you got so much going on in the boat. The fish is absolutely losing its mind and it's on a big rod with a big line and a big single hook. So, like everything happens, nothing happens in slow motion with that technique. No, no, no flipping, and I mean in the boat and yeah, yeah, dude, that was.
Speaker 1:That was Very much a highlight of my season. And how often do you get to catch the big fish of a day?
Speaker 2:And oh, yeah, and get it, and get it filmed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and have a camera in the boat. I mean, what are the odds of that happening? I don't know, but that's pretty awesome.
Speaker 2:And that's. That is where we get into my disparity of why I feel like I put myself in a situation to have a chance to win. I've been a good amount but I it never happens, and it's because rarely ever so in terms of catching giant fish, the number of times I have weighed a fish over five pounds in a major tournament is so when I say major tournament, I'm talking Toyota's, an invitation, so I call them sir. I have weighed a fish over five, I think Four times. Four times in any Toyota or invitation. Avoid one over five, four times. Even. You know, in in nine multiple 19 pound bags at gunnersville, a couple 19 pound bags of you follow 19 pound bag it Ozarks high 18 at Ozarks I've caught only four over five pounds. And Well, like 14 tournaments and like you, look at that stat and that is probably on the bottom 25% Of most of the field in terms of tournaments to five pounders.
Speaker 1:Well and especially guys that have your amount of checks and amount of top you know, 25 to 40th finishes, because typically that's what propels those guys to be up in the top 25, but what propels you is catching a solid two and three a lot of three, three pounders. Yeah three.
Speaker 2:Lot of I had so this year. So for reference we talk about this season I've caught Over five. I have caught three fish over five this year. I've caught an almost six at Um At Kentucky. I caught a six and a quarter at the St Lawrence River and I caught a seven and a half at Grand Lake and Every other tournament that I've fished this year. So I've caught those three this year over five. But over four I've caught I'm talking probably at least 20, 22 to 25 this year.
Speaker 2:That's a lot over a lot of four pounders but but only three, five pounders, which means that there's something in the way that I fish that doesn't lend to catching giants very often, and when I have caught giants is in. I've caught a couple giants and smallmouth tournaments. But here's the thing, it's smallmouth fishing. Smallmouth eat finesse technique, regardless of how big they are. I got a six, four on a demeanour here in five pound line and then the almost six I caught in Kentucky was when they're spawning, which is when, you know, big largemouth typically tend to eat a smaller presentation more often, which is around the spawn, you know and it's when those bigger fish are up there around the populations of fish more often.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. And the other two that I've caught the last two years over five in a major tournament have both been seven plus pounders and they both been on an Alabama.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is? Which is like a different animal. I mean, that's the best big fish catching rig of all time 100% when, when you have the conditions for it for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I thought I had a seven and a half last year at Lake of the Ozarks and the Toyota there on on an every but like I think a lot of it's, it's technique. But I mean I throw a jerk bait a good amount and I throw a swing.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, out of those, out of those three big ones, three biggest fish that you've caught in a tournament this year, two out of three were on a spinning rod and finesse presentations which smallmouth I mean we'll, we'll equate that to a bait caster for a largemouth tournament. I mean that doesn't count. Just as a you know I'm fishing power versus finesse.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, but like you tend to catch way more big ones, I mean how many?
Speaker 1:Okay, so, so this year, grand I weighed. I weighed almost seven and a five the first day. Two fives. On day two, clarks Hill, I caught the almost seven, that's five. Dardanelle, I caught three. So I think that's why I think I'm an eight and every single one of those was on a bait caster Eight to my three eight out of eight were not fishing a finesse technique, which I do a majority of the time.
Speaker 1:But all of those fish, all of those fish, except for one, I believe, which is the one at Clarks Hill, because I was just flipping the channel swing, all of those I threw a, I was either flipping a jig or throwing a square bill or jerk bait to a piece of cover you know it was. It was all like I saw the fish through to him, like it, dardanelle, I caught three, five pounders and two on a square bill and one was on jig and it was just directly throwing to the fish, the same way that we finesse fish, but just happened to be, you know, bigger ones, and I don't know that that a drop shot wouldn't have caught those same fish. Though that's the hard thing to say because you're still throwing.
Speaker 2:Throw two baits at the same time. Exactly so and your first cast is always your most valuable, but that's why you have big boy trophies and I don't is because you have been consistently way better at deciding when to apply power techniques than I am. I just kind of lean on the spinning around 20%.
Speaker 1:Here's the problem, though I'm not the problem, but how me and you fish and practice very similar and we share information and it's it's never like, hey, this spot has them, but it's yeah, areas, area breakdown or pools breakdown, or it is how these fish are doing, whatever, how they're relating or what, what, what they're going to how they're, what kind of cover they're relating to, how they're relating to it.
Speaker 2:You know, is it up current or down current?
Speaker 1:What the?
Speaker 2:water temperature is what the color is, all the aspects that make a bass live on a certain thing. Yeah, other than you know saying, hey, this is the creek I'm fishing, and this is the point.
Speaker 1:I'm on Right. Everything that makes the bass be there is what we try to figure out, and so we typically figure out a fishery rather than just find the fish. And so what me and you do in practice is we find as many three pounders as we can, and so typically that equates to making checks. And let's see, between the both of us, we fished I don't know six, six Toyota, seven Toyotas. And no, no, no, this year I fish, I fish, yeah, I fish, three, you fish for you mean between the two.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, between the two of us, yeah, and I mean we've lots mainly top tens and in teens, like we're just in work, we're just catching fish.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so and so what that does, is it? Those bigger fish typically don't hang out around the population of smaller fish. So, like for me, for example, in college, the first two years, whenever I had less experience, my partner Cameron and I won some college tournaments, and then, when we won, well, we won our last one in 2021 on grand, and it was with no big fish, by the way, it was just being consistent with like 13.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was just extremely tough.
Speaker 1:But from that point on I started to learn how to find fish consistently, which drastically changed my tournament results and it wasn't like first or second or 50th anymore, it was more consistently 10th to 30th. And it's really hard to break that barrier, to get to the top five Whenever you're not catching the fish. But those bigger fish typically aren't doing it. The bigger population are doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and here's the thing is, despite our system. So our system, I would say statistically, with the amount of money that we've made, combined the last you know year since we started doing this at Truman, I'd say it works. It works extremely well.
Speaker 2:Because you can corner an entire fishery in two or three days to a couple areas of the lake that are that are right and and corner what the best deal is to be doing. But here's where it diverges is that me and you oftentimes end up doing a similar deal in similar areas, but I never end up fishing around you. And here's the other thing is what you do in practice Oftentimes what you end up catching a lot of your fish on. You hone the bait a little bit more in practice than I do. So I have such a supreme confidence in throwing a spinning rod that, like in practice, I'll have a bait cast rod in my hand most of the time.
Speaker 2:But by the time the tournament comes around, you know my boat 180 is in practice. You know, a lot of times I've got a bait cast rod in my hand and in the tournament oftentimes I've got just spinning rods or almost just spinning rods, whereas you kind of hone the technique just as much as you do the areas, which I think lends to consistently catching more big fish, because the very few opportunities you do get at giant ones, you catch them because you've got everything dialed, whereas when I show up and I've got most things dialed, but not everything dialed. I think you know it lends to a little bit of increased flexibility, but what it doesn't lend to is maximizing very few opportunities at giant fish because you already have everything dialed going into it.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that, based off that argument, your style is better for consistency and making money really and being able to change with the conditions and make more top 10s. Because when are we not faced with changing conditions in tournaments, whether it's rising, falling water, changing temperatures, fish coming?
Speaker 2:in or out of a spawn. It's probably got to be pretty close to 50, 50, maybe 60, 40, 60, change, 40, no change. I mean it changes. It changes often but there's a lot of times where it doesn't change. You know, you follow we're. We're given wind, but Okeechobee and Clarks Hill steady conditions. Ozarks steady conditions. Potomac River steady conditions. Mississippi River steady conditions.
Speaker 1:Right, but those fish can still move on on steady conditions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they can, they can.
Speaker 1:But. But like we were saying before, we typically find the population of fish, and so we're still going to be around them. No matter if they've moved a little bit or not, there's still enough fish around.
Speaker 2:And that's that is the biggest, I think the biggest fact.
Speaker 2:You know me and you have talked about this a lot, but, for the sake of saying this on air, the biggest deciding factor in what makes what I do and what you do different, even though we're doing very similar things often, is that you trust baths and I don't trust them worth a crap, which means, whenever things are going according to plan or predictably, you are always going to be a notch above where I'm at, because you fish more aggressively, you take what we do and you trust them to act the way you want them to act, but I don't trust them whatsoever, which I think you know does lend to the part where you said you know the consistency aspect of it, which is, I think, a poor, probably a poor term for this, because you're, you know, the most impressive thing about what you do is you're extremely consistent at it.
Speaker 2:But even so, I you know, consistently, I'm going to put a lot of quality bites in the boat, but ultimately, whenever you don't trust baths, generally speaking, you kind of get locked into areas a lot more often. You don't do a whole lot of running around and you're not going to do the things that are necessary to win, because when you don't trust them, you're going to turn into a vulture, and what you're going to do is you're going to scavenge everything you can possibly find and catch everything in front of you. And how often is what's in front of you what wins the tournament? Not often, not often.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because it's usually typically to win tournaments, something very specific or like certain stretches, or you know, it's not just I'm fishing a little bit of here, a little bit of there, the same as everyone else. So I agree on that.
Speaker 1:But, the problem. The problem with the way I fish this year is so I typically have, like I don't know, between 10 and 12 rods on the deck, and no matter what it is, even if I know I'm going to fish with three of them, and I think my problem was trying to fish too aggressively instead of catching what I just could have caught, because I made two checks out of six in the invitationals and really uncharacteristic from the way that you fish which is not very good.
Speaker 1:And, exactly, I usually just do that and catch the fish that are there, but I also think that catching more, bigger fish this year has put confidence in that aggressiveness to try to catch more of them, and so, yeah, I think that was. That was being trying to be aggressive, I think is what made my season what it was.
Speaker 2:And you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think another big motivating factor to your aggressive aggressiveness and mine that I was going to indulge in it across that I didn't end up doing because of barge traffic situations is the field that we're fishing against. The weights are consistently so high that you feel the need to fish in aggressive manner.
Speaker 2:Oh, exactly Because you want to get ahead of the curve, because if you find yourself in our field trying to consistently try to catch 14, I mean we see it from a viewer's perspective we got 14 pounds. That sucks, because we're watching the BPT, early elites are watching, whatever you know, any of these tours and we're watching them fish these dynamite fisheries and going 14 pounds is garbage. And then you get out there and you realize, man, not only do I have to, a lot of these times you, not only do I have to catch 14 or 15 months, I got to do it two days in a row just to just to make the top third of the field.
Speaker 1:Right. Or even looking at the results, typically you see the top 50 and you're like, oh, you got 50th place. He kind of sucks a little bit. That's not the case when you're fishing against this level of competition. Like it is hard to make it in that top 50. Because of how consistently these guys catch them. You can't do what you do in college and catch 12 and a half 13 pounds and survive consistently. Well, you survive, you make championship. You cannot do that when you're fishing at this level.
Speaker 2:These guys are too good 100% and the thing is like it invites you to do reckless, aggressive decision making because it feels so good when you can get ahead of the curve in one of those, because you feel way safer when you're not around that bubble, because if you can go out, say, you go out at you fall and you go bust 18 or 19 pounds the first day. You feel way better on that joint. Catching a big bag one day, then trying to catch 14 and a half pounds twice, because doing that twice there is really difficult because you don't even know if you're going to catch five that day.
Speaker 1:Like, or you have 13 and then, like man, I have to catch like 15, 15 and a half.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you got to slightly improve it and it's just, it's so inviting to go out and fish aggressively because it's what you have to do to ever feel ahead of the curve. And you know, ultimately, my saving grace and a couple of these so in the Potomac River and you follow my saving grace was I only had one deal. So I knew, you know, I was going to do that deal and I wasn't going to make any adjustments. I was going to do it until success or failure and it ended up working at you fall and I worked the first day at Potomac and then Ozarks was one where kind of you know, after the warmup we had at Kentucky Lake, really just kind of felt natural, went out, had a very aggressive practice and found a lot of fish and that was one where it wasn't like it wasn't in that middle ground you don't want to be in. It wasn't in that. You know I found a lot of stuff, but not enough. You either want to be in. I found one or two places but they're really good.
Speaker 2:Before that I found just an exorbitant amount of stuff that I can fish however I want throughout the day and feel comfortable that if I need to pull the plug and go catch a good one. I can pull the plug and go catch a good one. Ozarks was one of those and Mississippi River was a bit of both. That's. That's a tournament I want to hear. I want to hear you talk about that tournament a little bit, because you're. My situation was, you know, we, I was trying to decide between whether I was going to go up to seven or down to nine first day of the tournament, and barges made it where I didn't feel comfortable going to seven. So I made the layup decision or what I thought was the layup decision to keep myself in it and not risk it. But you approach it a little bit differently.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which your decision ended up getting you ninth place and was not a layup decision.
Speaker 2:No, but at the moment I didn't know that.
Speaker 1:No, but I mean it ended up pretty well for me. So I went up to seven and I got to fish every day, not near as much as I want to. We had barge troubles every single morning where day one we took off at six, 30. Day one I didn't start fishing till nine, 30. Day two we were lucky and the barge was going through as we took off so I got up there an hour late, so like seven, 30. And then the last day I got there like 945. So pretty much cut out two days of the tournament. My first three hours of getting to fish which is the biggest.
Speaker 2:It's the biggest time of day on the Sippir River by far.
Speaker 1:Oh, 100%. Yeah, it's a. It's a. It's a time whenever those fish are schooling and feeding in. It's, like he says, just good. So the problem is is pooling it kind of sucks. I know that tournaments are consistently one. There's lots of checks, cut whatever.
Speaker 1:It's a really, it's a really big pool. Okay, yeah, there's a population of fish, but I have fished that pool every time that I've been there, which has been three times now, and I can never catch hardly anything of any size, anything that I would want to say hey, I might have a good tournament if I go do this. That never happens.
Speaker 2:The biggest bag I've ever caught, nate was 13 pounds.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly Like it just right and but, but consistently I have always seen the size in pool seven. Two years ago we had a college tournament and me and Cameron came in 10th place and I lost like a four, four and a quarter pounder, a couple threes and those would have all been the biggest fish that we had and we lost all of them still got 10th place. So it's like dang. There's a good population of like good large mouth. And then last year Hunter Bayard, my partner, and I we fished up there in that college tournament and in practice Hunter caught a six pounder Like that is a absolute unicorn for the Mississippi River up there, absolutely just a giant fish. And then this year in practice up there I caught a four and a half pound small mouth.
Speaker 1:There's just a lot of fish activity going on because the water level is lower than normal and so I fished a little bit like a half a day and nine and caught a lot of fish. Like you know, 1213 pounds was like not just super easy, but there was plenty of fish to be able to sit on like wing dams and do that. But I was like man to be able to like be around size enough to have a chance. I got a fish in pool seven. Even if I only get like two or three hours, I have to go up there to give myself a chance, and so I waited for the barges every day just to just to go up there and try to catch some big, small mouth, and I didn't have any like giants.
Speaker 1:I ended up catching a three and a half pounder up there. I caught a four pound large mouth on a wing dam but you know that is unbelievable, which is crazy, right, a four pound larger than a wing dam. And then I ended up catching one like three and a half on a wing dam in a pool late. But I don't think that I had the right experience to help me fish those wing dams that I had efficiently enough with the time that I was given. So obviously that's where the gosh on the last day top third of the field, there was 11 of us up there and 123. Couple other guys in the top 10 came from up there Really fishing the grass flights in Alaska, something that I couldn't figure out in practice. But that just goes to show you like that's just. It's a small pool but the size is definitely there and I know that potential is probably an eight to, but I don't know why.
Speaker 1:do you think that the size is what it is in pool seven?
Speaker 2:My theory was seven is that you have. So seven you have more prominent areas of current adjacent to all of the flat stuff. So eight you have main current, you've got a little bit of trickle current mixed in with a lot of really shallow flat areas. You have down and stodder. You got a big flat area. And then you in the far backwaters you've got a couple deeper channels, but in seven you got main channel, deep water, deep water current, deep water current, deep water current, deep water current all the way into on Alaska and then it hits the flat and it stays flat. You don't have inconsistency, which makes it one.
Speaker 2:The fish can choose what kind of deal they're wanting to be on at that time. Really well, they can. Okay, they want to be on the main river or they want to be in the shoots or they want to be in the back water on the flat stuff. But you don't have all that stuff mixing together. You have certain sections of that pool that set up a certain way and the whole section sets up that way.
Speaker 2:In pool eight there's so much stuff where it's like deep and then it just goes to six inches of water for 300 yards and then it goes deep again and like it's so inconsistent and it makes the navigation for those fish so difficult, and I think that's what fosters such a big fish population. Is big fish like habitating in certain small areas? Now they may move throughout the year, but big fish don't like just swimming and swimming and swimming. Big fish like to have areas that they consistently habitate and in pool seven that you know, it really invites that, because if they want to live shallow in the Elgrass, they can. They can go to Alaska. They want to live in those shoots and those deep holes and in the current, you know, in that side wash current. They can do that. And if they want to live on the main river, they can do that. But they don't have all of that stuff blending together in these areas and they're not forced to traverse through areas they don't want to just to get to where they want to go.
Speaker 1:Right, and that's just set up with how the river is. I mean, pool seven is so much smaller than pool eight or pool nine.
Speaker 2:Small, it's narrow.
Speaker 1:Mega, huge but and also the population of shad. Like all week and in practice I was around huge numbers of shad, all the guys that were fishing out in Lake on Alaska. You know it's just a grant giant grass flat that has these ditches of sand bottom from the current making it clean and they were just concentrated in certain areas where the bait fish were set up. And I know that's a really big thing, the later in the year it gets, just like anywhere they really set up on the bait fish and they use that current to their advantage and so I feel like, like you're saying, that they can school up easier because it isn't a vast area of, like you said, sand flat, sand shoots or sand drops that actually build up and come all the way up to the surface, but it allows that current to flow through and so there's so many more current set up areas in pool seven.
Speaker 2:It's easier to find current when there's no current in seven.
Speaker 1:Right and there's. So there's current just about everywhere in pool seven, even in the backwaters, because of having these little channels, or I call them like canals. They're not, they're not very big, they're just cut out ditches that lead out to these areas, but they always concentrate around that and then, like in the fall, I've heard that these gizzard shad get on current break type stuff and these guys catch them on a big spook, on bullshad, on on big shad baits and they catch big large amount of big, big, small mouth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and a rig? They just destroy them. So I actually think that if we went to Mystic River, like later in the year, the weights would be better. The weights would be really good yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and like, still still a fun week? Oh yeah, it was, it was enjoyable and my, my experience was a little bit different. It was more of a. You know, you did kind of the do what a lot of people were doing, but just find a way to do it better. You did it more high percentage. You, you did more bait rotating and you, you did it. Essentially, you just tried to time everything right and dot all your Ts and cross all your eyes. You know what I'm saying and yeah, pretty much, and luckily for me.
Speaker 1:Luckily, because I thought there was going to be more guys doing this, but whenever I came out of the lock at pool seven, 95% of the guys took a right and went into Lake on Alaska. Yeah, and there was only three of us that were fishing the wing dams, which was me, jordan, her and Paul Lias, who sat on one wing dam all day, so it didn't have to worry about him taking up fish but, but yours was a bit different Decided to go down.
Speaker 2:So I went down to nine with the plan of I had. I had some wing dams found, I had a couple, you know. I had a backwater area with some undercuts that was half decent and then I had a couple sand drops that I thought were decent and I had one area that was a big milk will or not milk Well, big eelgrass flat that had had some fish in it and I was, like you know, with the whole lock situation. At seven on day one I was like I'm going to, I know I can go down to nine, catch 12 to 14 and stay, stay relevant. And so I went down to nine, finally get down there after hour and a half and get down there, get to my first place and I start fishing and it's just it's not happening, like everything I go to is not happening. And so I catch like a high two, catch a couple of one-somethings off wing dams and it's just not popping the way it was. And so I run around and go to my backwater area, go to my undercuts right, and undercuts at the Mississippi River are one of the most consistent ways when you find a good area to catch that 12 to 13 pounds over and, over and over again. So I pull up to my area that's got the undercuts. I pull in there and I catch an almost three smallmouth. I catch two and a half pounds smallmouth. I catch a couple, two something largemouth and so I'm like it's popping. I get to like 12 pounds by like 1030.
Speaker 2:So at this point I'm feeling pretty good. You know I've got a decent start. Enough to stay relevant. You know, if I was to catch a big bag the second day. But I was like I need to, I need to try and pull out a couple of these two pounders Maybe. I was like I'm going to catch two more threes today.
Speaker 2:And I ran around. I had a brush pile that I found in the backwater in the Mississippi River, a brush pile and I pull up on it and I'm fishing it and I finally it's like 10 feet in front of the trollmutter pitch my drop shot out there hanging at the top of the pile and this fish just eases over to my drop shot and just goes. I just feel it and I go and it was a two, 15 largemouth. So almost three pounder. And then so that that I'm like awesome, I've kind of hodgepodge this up. This is great and I was at like at that point. I was at almost 14.
Speaker 2:And then I pull up on a place that I thought was I. So I had a couple of eelgrass stretches that I caught, some big ones on practice that just didn't pan out. Those were the only fish that were there. And so I pull up on a place that I thought was a limit hole because I thought maybe I could catch a high two or something. You know, coles mouses and I dropped scope and start looking around and I see this school of bait right and there's two or three just blowing it apart. So I throw my swim bait over the same one I held up.
Speaker 1:How deep? How deep is this?
Speaker 2:Three feet and I mean they're just blowing bait apart. And three feet, throw my swim bait up there and right at the trolling motor it flashes and goes and it was a, it was a two, 12 largemouth. So I'm like awesome, you know, now I got. Now I got like 13 and you know high 13s and coasted right at 14. And, like you know, that was a good little upgrade. Now, now I've got a good quality bag and I start poking around this area and I catch a couple two and a half pound small mouth and then I see this school, like 40 in one school of bait 35 to 40 bass and three or four feet of water. Now, like this is absolutely nutty, throw my swim out there and they are just fighting over it. Like I can see the boils in the water.
Speaker 2:I mean there's that many bass fighting over it in that shallow water. And it was like that, that sand drop deal that Chris Johnson was doing last year in the elite event there, um, or like that event. That was like 2015, I think that Alton Jones Jr was catching on the on the eel grass flats where, like there's so many fish, you don't even know what to do with, and it's something that, until this year, I had only ever heard of on the Mississippi River never seen it.
Speaker 2:And like the first fish that grabs, it three, 10 smallmouth, so an almost three and three quarter smallmouth, and I get to 14, 15,. I catch that fish, I make one more cast and I hook like a two and three quarter smallmouth that jumps off and I said I can't, I can't do this, I pull the plug, ran back to the lock, you know, and it's a long run, long, long lock section session. So I put my earbuds in. I'm just, I'm just chilling, I'm bumping tunes. You know I'm planning, like you know, I'm going to come back here, I'm going to trash them. So way in, I'm in. Uh, I'm in like 14, 15. I think I'm barely in the top 15 with almost 15 pounds, which is just nutty for the Mississippi River.
Speaker 2:And, uh, day two I go out, I go down there and and I get down first, same cast jump off like a three pound smallmouth. I'm like this is just great, and so one of my swim bait pull into it comes off. So I like lose a three and one that I thought was probably about two and three quarter in the first five minutes of the day. Then I'm fishing around. Uh, next one I catch is another three, 10 smallmouth.
Speaker 1:This is, uh. This is where you saw the giant school of them the day before. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so there's, there's about 20, 25 left. Uh, by the time I get back on day two and I catch three, 10, catch a two, nine or two 10s, a medium high two. So I got two I can live with, catch another two, two, two, two. I catch two pounder and it's bleeding and I'm like, oh no, what do I do? I know it, I need one more to get to five. I'm like you know what? I'm going to throw it back, I'm not going to risk it. And then the thunderstorms roll in and day two it it got gnarly on us for about 40 minutes. Where it was, it was blowing gusts of 40 plus pouring lightning, like every time you put the rod in here, it was bad.
Speaker 2:It was. It was rough and I so I pull up on the bank, I'm waiting it out. I'm not getting struck by lightning over this, I'm like you know, all I need is it's a good hour, hour and a half fish on this place to catch them. So I waited out. It gets about 930 and it starts to pass.
Speaker 2:Finally get back out there and the 40 plus minor winds in this depth of water had turned the entire area, Just turned it to sand, just sand everywhere, sand, particulate everywhere. Like every fish I saw on scope was like push, you can see the sand move with their tail, Like that's how much sand was in the water, and it just blew this area out. I caught one more, two and a quarter, and I fished there for like three hours and I had nothing left in the tank. But ultimately I was like you know, I come, I'm running back, I've got 13, like 13 and a quarter, in the well. I'm like you know it's it's okay, Dave, but I'm not really happy with this. But I was like you know, if that sand settles, those fish didn't just disappear. Like if that sand settles, that they'll reset up on it and I think I can catch another couple, three something founders the next day and catch 13 or 14 again At that rate, you know Marshall, Marshall had a rough.
Speaker 2:No, he had a good first day and then he had kind of a rough second day, and which which?
Speaker 1:it's, it's at this point. It's you and Marshall for Angler or rookie of the year and a bass yeah. So this is a crucial decision.
Speaker 2:And so I'm going into day three and Marshall's in like 30 something place and I'm like I got to beat him by 21 spot. So I'm like what's my best cause? I was like if I can catch like 12 and a half or better, I'll, I'll stay where I'm at. And I knew that Cole you know me and Cole had communicated about what we were doing and what, what pools we were going to. So I knew a lot of the stuff Cole was fishing. Up in seven was some stuff that I, you know, I was going to plan on fishing if I went up seven but after two days to get fish by him and the guys up there, I was like you know, I don't think that's probably a smart decision. And and Cole was still in great shape, I mean, you were only like three or four spots behind me yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, after the second day. And so, like I was like you know he's, he's in position to have a good event. Plus, you'd you'd been fishing that stuff for a couple of days. I didn't think, with that many days of fishing, that pool under your belt, that I could catch him any better than you had been, and with what you had been catching, that was what I was aiming to catch, at least the last day. To make sure you know, I gave myself fighting chains.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I got tougher every day, so and so I I made the decision to go down to nine again and I I run down to my starting area and it's still blown out like sand everywhere. Still, I don't even know how, cause it was slick, super sleek. But I get out there and I fish it for an hour and I catch like a one 12 small mouth. I'm like, oh, my goodness, the wheels are coming off. This is going to be embarrassing because, like the Mississippi river, if you catch like eight pounds last day of the tournament, I don't care how high you are, if there's 50 guys fishing, you're going to, you're going to be the last guy, drop down to the 40s Fair minimum. And so I was like this is awesome. The wheels are coming off, just like Potomac River.
Speaker 2:And I'm running down the river trying to make an adjustment and I see a wing down pop up and I'm like this is, this is the juice. I'm like this is a shallow wing down. I didn't know it was there, but it's this, this is, this is the depth I wanted to be on, which is like two to four feet. I pull up on it. It's like six, seven, eight feet deep. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like this is way too deep and and I was just spun out, and then I I turned my trolling motor like left, and I turn it and I just see bait just cover the back half of my screen and I just see them I mean brown ones just darting through the bait left and right, probably 25 of them. And I start catching them like cast for calves for probably a good 40 minutes and I get to like 12 and change and I've got like a bunch of two somethings and then I catch a three, four and I'm like, oh, there's some big ones here. And so I I catch that three, four, make a little bit of a bait, change upsize my head, throw back out there three pounder.
Speaker 2:I'm like, oh my gosh, I have just single-handedly and everything was going so smooth, I was like this might be my day and I keep fishing, catch some more twos, call up a little bit more, and then I take one more pass over the like the epicenter of this wing dam that had like most of the big ones. You know, every time I threw over it I saw 10 or 12 chase it out and I switched my head size again to where I can reel it a little bit faster, even still. And I pull up on it, make one more, cast over it, like with 15 minutes left because we had to be back by 1130. And I pull up, make one more, cast over it, line it and I see two or three big ones just arc off the wing dam and I I turned my troll motor just slightly away and lost sight of him. And it just goes and caught another three pounder at 14 and change, I mean absolutely just saved my season from the brink of disaster and with with how magical it felt, I'm running back to the lock going.
Speaker 2:There might be a chance that I've I've done this, that I've done what I needed to do to to give myself, you know, a real shot at this happening. You know, everything just went so smooth.
Speaker 2:I thought maybe it was meant to be that day and it just wasn't and but nonetheless I mean such a fun event caught a ton of fish and it was really cool to get in on the classic Mississippi river fishing that people always talk about, where you just you're covered in fish and it's just about how fast you can catch them. And it was. It was really enjoyable. I pull, pull nine. I give it like an eight out of 10 stars and the only two are just for size.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it's. The population in pool eight is just amazing, and out of the guys that go down there it typically turns out pretty well because there's not a lot of guys that make that trip down there.
Speaker 2:It's the best pool in the river for catching 13 pounds by far.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. For sure, but I mean this tournament, 13 pounds a day. Got you 26th place.
Speaker 2:So a good tournament, but not what I, not what I needed to do to have a chance.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I mean you couldn't have done much better, given that you got ninth place and this was kind of more up to Marshall, kind of winning for himself, because I put the ball on his court on the last day. Yeah, I mean he, he needed to catch him, he needed to have like a pretty decent day for the Mississippi.
Speaker 2:And then he did.
Speaker 1:He had 13 and a half pounds and he he made the BPT and you're out of rookie of the year by like a pound. I mean, that was his, that was his way. If you had caught a pound less and this is crazy, how this amount.
Speaker 2:Five points.
Speaker 1:The whole season it was five places. So, for example, I mean you got 110 to Clark sale. That is a single. What? Two and a half pounder?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that would have done it and that's crazy, I dumped a four and a half at Clark sale and a four at Okeechobee and a three at Okeechobee and I don't know how big the other one was at Clark sale, but I any of those fish Now granted, we can't look at it as a lost fish cost me it, because lost fish costs a lot of people, a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the deal, because a lot of those guys that are yeah, a lot of those guys that are up there ahead of you guarantee they had also lost fish or you know, on some sort of circumstance, that they could have done a little bit better. Everybody typically has that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:And you know that's another rabbit hole. Conversation, too, is like you know how much are are when you get to our level and the levels above how much when you get to that level of of a banner year is attributed to execution versus just understanding them better than you did the last year. Well, because there has been a lot of banner years and bass fishing made by people landing fish that they shouldn't land or landing everything in general.
Speaker 1:Oh, lost, you drew. He's trying to join again. Fine, you look like you bumped his camera. Hey, what's up?
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 1:You just decided over.
Speaker 2:It turns out if you get a phone call and you try to swipe it away on this, you're just your day's over.
Speaker 1:But yeah, jp called me, so I'm swiping him away and I'm going to call him back later that's what we're saying was, hard work is something that is, I want to say, expected, but it's what you have to do.
Speaker 1:Standard and it's standard and it comes down to who had that lucky six pounder that jumped over a stick and into your boat or you know, like if you didn't lose like any key fish throughout the season. That doesn't happen very often and the biggest thing that I see that separates those top, those like for real top 10 guys, from the guys that are 40s, 50s, 60s still good fishermen. But it's the mindset, it's when they make their changes. It's every little thing about the decisions that they make, which a lot of times is something very minute. It's just a minor detail that they catch on to that makes a huge difference throughout the season. So I think I had this conversation with Keith Carson very smart dude, but he said that every year he like picks something to learn or something to try to fix about his fishing and the biggest one that he's done is to bail. Like if something's not working, he bails, and so he fishes the conditions every day and I think that's something that is really hard to do in fishing because we practice extremely hard.
Speaker 1:We practice for three solid days, send up to send down, and you like, figure something out. You're like, okay, I just need to go find some more of this or whatever. But he's, and that's the same deal about any guy on the top level is they practice every day of the tournament. They practice, they figure it out, they find new stuff and so you know that's a it's like an instinct deal. It's things go your way.
Speaker 2:And I think the best bailer in our field you know, obviously that's that is a cool approach to doing it and it's something that's definitely very stylish. I ain't the best bailer in our field. This year consistently had to be Marshall Robinson because he came to the end of his rope after the first day of the tournament. Five of six events. Five of six events. He had poorer first days than second days and the only second day all year that he had worse than his first was at the Mississippi River, and it was worse by you good, I'm looking at it right here it was a, it was a pound, that was it.
Speaker 1:It was three pounds. He went from 14, six to 11, 10.
Speaker 2:Shoot. He only got 11 pounds, Anyways you only yeah, you only yeah. That was the only day of six tournaments in, like every tournament. You know you look at my season, every tournament, my day one to day two, progression. My weight went down every day, all season. Now of the day threes, I made you follow my weight improved the last day in Mississippi River.
Speaker 1:My weight improved the last day and and both of those from what you said today are we're finding new fish.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, it was making an adjustment, finding new fish, yeah, and it's just so hard to do to make an adjustment, because we have such a wealth of information going into the event from you know, the days we spent out there that that if it didn't work before, why is it going to work now? And oftentimes you got to break free of that mindset and that's where those guys that fish, naturally, are so much more advanced, because they, they can make that adjustment. And that's something I've got to work on is like I I'm. I pride myself to be a good practiser and I pride myself in being very good at making the most out of what I end up finding. Like my goal is to be the vacuum. I want to catch everything in sight. But when it really hits the fan and you run out of fish, it you got to be good at just feeling it out. And as far as feeling it out goes, that's something with this deal I've never been good at and it's something I'm really hoping to get better at.
Speaker 1:Is 100% one of the hardest things in fishing, because you don't, it's uncertain and everybody's scared of uncertainty, no matter what it is. But in fishing everything's uncertain already, so to throw more uncertainty into the equation is hard to deal with sometimes. So I think that's that's what it equates to, because, like you said, you don't trust bass, you don't trust that they're going to be where you think they're going to be, yeah, so. So I mean, you want to hang around where you know there's fish and and, like you said, catch the fish that are there.
Speaker 2:That's why I really appreciate fisheries like Champlain or Lake St Clair or some of the Herring Lakes, some of the Ozark Lakes, at times the situation we got in at Gunnersville in November last year, where you don't have to trust them. You don't have to because it's so obvious and it's so meticulous about what you do to make them bite that it's no longer about trusting that they're going to be where you think they're going to be. It's purely about just forcing them into biting. And that's that's the situations that are my favorite.
Speaker 1:I love, I love that yeah.
Speaker 2:Trying to find a way to catch them that nobody else is doing, or find a way to catch them that tricks them better than anything else, because ultimately, if I, if I know I'm around them, I trust them. But I, you know, ultimately the biggest part of trust is is if you can take out the whole are they there? Aspect. It's so much easier because you can really lock into what you're doing and force them into and you know those situations I tend to do well in, because I can just focus on trying to make them bite rather than running around going. Are they here? Are they here? Are they here? What's changed? I don't have to worry about what's changed because they're there.
Speaker 1:Yep, that's exactly the case and I think that's what made me slow down. Not slow down but go into the more catching limits, more limits and less bigger bags. In college was I found fish and I sat down and caught them. I looked at them. I looked at them and you can watch and how they react and figure out how to catch them. And you know that can hurt sometimes. For sure, because those guys that sometimes base their whole pattern around running new water and catching the active fish and odd to foe is a wonderful example of that he just constantly covers new water, finds fish that are hungry and biting and it really works for him because he has the intuition, he's really good at it.
Speaker 2:And the most impressive the thing about being the vacuum, though, is that when you get in a situation like you got in Fort Gibson last year, when you are the vacuum and you get around the right group of fish, it gets ugly.
Speaker 1:Oh, it happens.
Speaker 2:Because you are catching everything in sight and everything inside is a big one. I've had that vacuum feeling only a few times in bass fishing. Generally it happens around the spawn when I'm catching them on scope, or it happened at Gunnersville in November and it happened at the Harris chain last year where, like you, just feel like when you choose to be the vacuum, you choose to be the scalpel rather than the chainsaw and you finally get around a group of fish. That's the right ones. Things get ugly in a matter of 30 minutes because you just you get every big one to bite and you put them in the boat. Things get out of hand in a good way really fast when you're the vacuum, because you take an area that has four or five big fish and instead of catching one, you catch three or you catch four or even, if you're lucky, you catch all of them.
Speaker 1:Which, in those given examples that you just gave, are the most important of pre-spawn. They're grouped up. Going up to spawn Florida, they're always grouped up. All the big fish live around each other and then in the fall, those fish live around bait. So when you find a concentration of fish, it's typically a lot of fish. So that's what you want to do is catch as many of them as you can and call as much as possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's any more with how you know how pressured our fisheries are. If you can find a way to make an intentional effort to catch every single big fish that you come into contact with and don't go oh man, he didn't bite, I'll go find another one. If you make an intentional effort on every big one that you can, in every situation, in my opinion you're going to be more consistent than most everyone else, because, instead of fishing for a fish that you're not guaranteeing that you're going to find, you are making an intentional effort to make one bite that you know is better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%, 100%, which is an interesting conversation that I think a lot of people maybe don't think about it that way. You know and I know they unintentionally people do that all the time. They don't want to leave fish and you're sitting there like you can spend way too much time fishing for fish that aren't going to bite. But I think typically from people that I talk to that aren't successful with that, they don't adjust, they don't change enough to catch those fish which a lot of it is just reading their behavior.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and you have to learn and adapt to what they're doing and how they're behaving into making them behave how you want them to. So that'll be a good conversation for another episode, absolutely. So to round things out, we have a Toyota on Lake of Ozarks here in about a month which Drew and I are going to fight for Angler of the Year, and then hopefully we'll get our new invitational soon, schedule soon and we can be excited about that.
Speaker 2:So it was sent out very beginning of September last year. So I'm expecting about that we're close.
Speaker 1:We're close for sure. I mean they already have everything set. They're just holding on to the schedule for whatever reason.
Speaker 2:Yeah for whatever, I'm ready for them to drop it so I can start mentally preparing because that's, that's big thing. It's just when they get that out, I can get this past year, just I can bury it and I can focus on that because it's really tangible. Once they give you where you're going, it gets really tangible because you can picture it.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, and me and you, we're betting on a schedule that fits us better than this year it's going to be. We know at least we're going to San River and a couple smallmouth fisheries not rivers and hopefully Rumor has it some other lakes that are life-scopable reservoirs that we can do some damage on. So we're excited. But hopefully they release it soon and they will. But yeah, we'll be able to go through that and absolutely wrongly estimate on how exactly we think it's going to happen.
Speaker 2:And that'll be. That'll be a talk for another time soon, but whenever they, whenever they drop that, that's going to be something to look out for, because I'm sure we'll definitely overcomplicate it and extrapolate everything about the schedule 100% like normal.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, guys, this is on Apple podcast, spotify, youtube. Please check out all of our episodes. Me and Drew are going to have another one pretty soon, like we said, to go over the schedule and whatnot and get excited about the rest of the year. So thank you, guys, for watching Drew, thanks for being on tonight.
Speaker 2:Anytime, buddy, I really appreciate it and you know, just like you said, thank you everybody for tuning in. You know as much as we like to talk about this stuff and extrapolate it and talk about the the wee little intricacies of it. That's the joy of these sorts of media content formats is you can't do this in Instagram posts, you can't do this in a YouTube video. This is the ability to truly delve in. I know I use it in my own, you know, usage of listening to podcasts, but it's a chance to truly delve into the mindscape of people that are doing this often and doing this, this level, and it's it's a huge benefit both for us and for you guys for us to just get to talk through all these, these thoughts, and for you guys just to get to get a look inside of what goes on in our heads when we talk about these situations. So it's I really appreciate everybody listening and it's it's a great resource for you guys and for us and looking forward to doing more in the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sounds good. Well, everybody, like I said, make sure to catch us next time on the Bass Central Fishing podcast. See you later.