The Inside Line

Every summer the Bassmaster Elite Series heads north, and that means big waves and big smallmouth. It is a fun way to fish but it also takes additional preparation to make sure my boat and the gear I use to tackle those big bronzebacks give me the best possible chance at success. Here are a few things I do to make sure all of my equipment is ready for the big water.

New lakes are always exciting, but they can be equally intimidating. I knew virtually nothing about Lake Oahe in South Dakota, other than it was huge and full of smallmouth bass … or so was the claim.

Entering this event, my expectations were high. The Upper Mississippi is thick with vegetation and other forms of shallow cover, perfect for my style and approach. In fact, my first trip to LaCrosse was particularly rewarding. The frog bite was off the hook, and I finished well within the money.

After a three-month postponement, BASS was finally able to hold the Sabine River event at Orange, Texas. The river was now back within its banks and conditions were stable after weeks of flooding.

Site selection for this year’s Texas BASSfest event was Lake Travis — a beautiful, deep and clear reservoir near the city of Austin.

During the pre-spawn, my bait of choice is a jerkbait and during the post-spawn, I love to throw topwater. This is nothing out of the ordinary as just about every bass angler uses these techniques during those times of the year, but one thing I like to mix in during both of these periods is a soft plastic jerkbait like the Yamamoto D-Shad. I fish it as a complement to my hard jerkbaits and walking topwater baits.

I like Kentucky Lake, but my track record there is weak at best. It’s full of bass — nearly all species in fact — but it can be fickle at times. And it’s almost always due to fluctuations in water level.

After competing on Grand Lake O’ The Cherokees so many times before, I felt my chances were strong going into this event, especially since it was spring.

The lake offers plenty of prime spawning habitat; including pea gravel and chunk rock banks within protected pockets. Visual targets include laydowns, willows, docks, bridges and all forms of rock transitions.

Between rumors, innuendo, strategic leaks and occasional snippets of fact-based reporting, it now appears that there will be three major bass tours in 2019. Both the peoplewhoknowmuchmorethanme and the peoplewhoknowmuchlessthanme seem to agree on that, despite not agreeing on much else.

In the early years of bass fishing, both kinds of music accompanied the pros – country and western – but as a new generation entered the fold, and their geographical footprint broadened, so too did their tunes.

Obviously, Tuesday’s press release from the MLF crew created a frenzy among fishing media and fans. My phone, email and Facebook accounts have been blowing up since then with questions about what I know and what I think about the state of the fishing world from here on forward. More than one person has asked “When are you going to write about it?”

Prior to our west coast trip, my wife Hanna and her friend Cindy made a decision that we would not stop and see friends or family along the way – and certainly wouldn’t detour to find them. With only seven full days and two partial days to eat and drink our way from Seattle to San Francisco, there simply wouldn’t be time….and if we made an exception for one couple’s friends, it would only be fair to do it for the other’s. Therefore, they settled on a policy with no wiggle room.

About 15 years ago, my boss was invited to give a presentation in Hawaii. By “invited,” I mean required to go, although it hardly seemed like a hardship as we suffered through the depths of a brutal mid-Atlantic winter. After all, they were going to fly him out there, put him up at some hotel on the beach, give him a per diem and all he had to do was give an hourlong talk about a topic about which he was already an expert.

The 2018 tour-level season has almost ended, and it appears that catch of 101 pounds 9 ounces of Kentucky Lake largemouths will be the only four-day catch to eclipse the century mark. But for the we’ll-never-know-what-would-have-been finish that Randy Haynes left on the table, Lambert’s catch was an outlier. He beat second place finisher Scott Martin by nearly 30 pounds.

On the afternoon of Saturday, August 18, while trolling with Captain Matthew Quintano, one of our rods was pulled down by a vicious strike. The fish was there for a second, but two cranks of the handle later it was gone. We reeled the crankbait in and attached to the front treble there was a gooey, slimy, yet hard-shelled orb. Somehow we’d managed to miss the musky’s mouth, but completely impaled its eyeball.

I’m generally wary of overarching generational generalizations. The idea that there is or was a “Greatest Generation” is probably wishful nostalgia. If nothing else, it oversimplifies things greatly – for every birth year, there are good people and bad people, serious folks and clowns, patriots and traitors.

Last week my wife Hanna finally slayed the St. Clair dragon.