I never would have guessed that Cherokee Lake would’ve produced my best finish in the first four events of the 2017 season, but here we are in mid-April and that’s the reality I’m facing. After “surviving” Cherokee with 13th place result, I stumbled to 81st at Okeechobee, 35th in the Classic and then 43re at Toledo Bend.
Before the year started, I figured that those last three would’ve been slugfests, but it didn’t quite turn out that way. It shows the problem with counting your chickens before they’ve hatched.
At Okeechobee, it was possible to catch 30 pounds one day and 11 the next. At both Conroe and Toledo Bend, the winning weights were much lower than expected. I’ve certainly had a few chances to do better. I had a great opportunity at Conroe, and at Toledo Bend I lost two 8-plus pound game-changers, but while I’m disappointed, I also feel like I dodged a few bullets.
While I believe that I’m a versatile fisherman, I definitely prefer to fish offshore. I thought that would be the best bite at Conroe, and while Jordan Lee eventually won out deep, that bite certainly wasn’t wide open. After our very mild winter in East Texas I expected that last week at Toledo would be all about offshore fish, but in the end they were only a minor player. The fish were in so many different phases that you’d look at other boats as they headed out in the morning and we all seemed to have 15 rods on the deck. It was possible to catch fish on a buzzbait, a jig, a crankbait, a spinnerbait and a frog, all in the same day. Jamie Hartman even caught some on a dropshot. That kind of diversity makes it fun, but it also makes it hard to dial in a winning pattern.
I spent three long days of practice on Toledo Bend, bouncing back from shallow to deep and back again. Eventually I more or less gave up on the offshore bite and committed to the shallow stuff, but that’s no way to come out on top. I just didn’t find the right fish. I feel like I would’ve had a lot more to go on if I’d spent the entirety of those three days looking shallow. On a lake like Toledo Bend, one that has a lot of fish and a lot of big fish, I’m at my best when I’m looking for groups of fish. On a place like the Sabine River, where 9 pounds is a good day, I have no trouble looking for individual bites, but on Toledo I live for those great flurries.
If we’d fished Toledo two weeks before or two weeks after the actual event, I’m convinced it would have been a jackfest. Don’t get me wrong, we were all happy to see John Murray win with 77 pounds, but two weeks from now it might’ve taken 87, or even 97. As we head into Ross Barnett, I’m hoping that our schedule is done with the “in between” phase – when no two fish seem to be doing the same thing. Then we’ll go to Rayburn, which may be the best lake in the country right now. I may not win, but I guarantee you that I won’t have 15 rods on the deck. I won’t lose any sleep that week over what stage of the spawn they’re in.