When I left my home for the final two events of the 2016 Elite season, I knew I was going to enjoy this northern swing. I went into last week’s final regular-season event in La Crosse, Wisc. with my 2017 Bassmaster Classic pretty well secured, so that allowed me to take some chances on this fishery.
Of course, you can always get stuck in a lock, or you can have mechanical issues or end up on a sandbar like Casey Ashley did in practice. These unexpected incidents can prevent you from making it back to the weigh ins and leave you with a zero for the day.
Thankfully, I didn’t experience any of these issues and I was able to look for what I thought were potentially winning places — kinda off the beaten path. I had a good plan, but sometimes you just don’t find those places in practice.
This time, I never found anything that I thought would give me the chance to win. When the event started, I just went fishing and caught enough to finish 37th and get paid.
Obviously, that’s not the finish I wanted, but considering the group I fish against, you have to be on your A-game every week just to get a check. I did my best to bring that level of performance to La Crosse; I just couldn’t find the right groups of fish to make it pay off like I wanted.
In practice, I wanted to catch them on a Booyah Pad Crasher so badly. I mean, I threw that frog a lot, but I just couldn’t get it in front of any quality fish. Throughout practice, I kept a frog and a punch rig with a YUM Bad Mama on my deck. I caught a lot of fish — just not the right ones.
Ended up catching my fish by burning the sand edges with a perch colored Booyah Boss Pop and a flipping undercut banks with a black/blue YUM Christie Critter. It seemed like the first hour of each tournament day those fish were really up on top of those sand bars.
In practice, I thought I could run with that the entire day because I caught them best around midday. I think I probably could have done that in the tournament had the current not gotten so swift. The water level changed, the clarity changed; I just had to keep the trolling motor down and hope I ran into the right quality fish.
I spent the first two days in Pool 8 so I could devote all my time to fishing and not mess with the lock. I was planning to do the same on day three, but at 11 a.m., I had two fish and I was sick of looking at Pool 8.
So, around 11 a.m., I locked through to Pool 7 and caught enough fish to move up a little on the third day. As soon as I got up there I was wishing I had spent more time up there.
I had gotten a few bites up there in practice, but when I pulled up there on that third day, they were biting. There were a lot more fish up there than I’d thought; I just didn’t have enough time to expand on it.
Surprisingly, all the fish I weighed last week were largemouth. I don’t think I caught a single keeper smallmouth all week. I fished a lot of areas like backwater current seams that I thought would hold smallmouth, but I just never found them.
All that’s going to change this week during the Angler of the Year Championship on Mille Lacs. This is my first visit to Mille Lacs and I’m looking forward to catching a bunch of smallmouth.
When I got done at La Crosse, I took all largemouth baits out of my boat just because I want to fish for smallmouth. I really haven’t gotten to do that much this season.
The last two events we’ve had have been digging the dirt with the trolling motor, but this week, I’m looking forward to finding fish with my Garmin Panoptix. I’d really like to catch them on moving baits like a YUM Pulse swimbait or a Booyah spinnerbait, but I’ll catch them anyway I can.
A lot of times, in practice, I’ll take the hooks off my baits, or bend the hooks down; but this week, you can bet all my hooks will be sharp for practice. If you’re on a lake with a relatively small population of fish, I’ll usually shake fish off, but from I’ve heard about Mille Lacs, I don’t think you can hurt them too bad by catching a few in practice.
Along with fun of catching smallmouth, there’s a lot on the line at this event. I can’t win Angler of the Year and I can’t fall out of the Classic; but there’s a lot of wiggle room for Angler of the Year money, so my goal is to finish this year on a good note and carry that momentum into next year’s Classic.