The Inside Line

Fishing in February on the St. Johns River can mean feast or famine, rarely anything in between. It’s all dependent on the weather. If a severe cold front moves in, forget about it. But if temperatures are on the rise, you better make sure your tackle is up to the task.

When B.A.S.S. first released the 2018 Bassmaster Elite Series schedule, I saw plenty of opportunity. Most of the venues seemed perfectly suited to my style of fishing, and I was anxious to get things rolling.

Unfortunately, with each passing event that optimism faded. In the end, I was left with the worst season of my 30-plus-year career.

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.

Alan Clemons reminded me the other day that Takahiro Omori’s Classic win took place nearly 15 years ago, a lifetime in fishing terms. That was the first Classic I covered as a member of the media, a thousand or so articles and two thousand plus blog posts ago, yet it seems like yesterday.

The March 2nd Bass Champs event on Lake Fork, ended with two teams in a tie for first place. Justin Woodard and Robert Smith weighed in a single bass for 10.28 pounds. Scott Barnett and Brian Clark weighed in five that totaled that same amount.

There are two good articles about spinnerbaiting in the March 2019 issue of Bassmaster, the first by Mark Hicks and featuring Rick Clunn and the second by Steve Price and featuring Matt Herren. They both discuss the same type of lure, but what really caught my attention was the fact that both successful pros had spinnerbait mentors:

Another Bassmaster Classic is fast approaching and as I looked back at the event’s recent history I was surprised to learn that the last western winner was Skeet Reese in 2009. As westerners have increasingly established themselves at the top of the Elite heap throughout the regular season and in accumulating AOY titles, there’s been a dearth of big trophy traffic going leftward across the country.

I’d guesstimate that I have 80 pounds of tackle in the two bags I keep in storage at Lake El Salto. Most of it consists of proven tools, but there are also plenty of items that haven’t produced a single fish for me down there – including flutter spoons, umbrella rigs and various glide baits. Their lack of production might be because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, or because I’ve fished them at the wrong times, or a combination of the two, but the bottom line is that they’re wasting space, and so far they’ve wasted time, too.

Much has been made of Rick Clunn’s seeming agelessness, the fact that some considered him over-the-hill before he won an Elite Series tournament on the St. Johns River in 2016, and then proceeded to match that feat to start the 2019 season. He’s 72 years old, has been fishing for a living for over four decades, and seems just as fascinated by the intricacies of the sport as he was in the 1970s.

The last time I’d visited Mexico’s Lake Picachos, in the summer of 2015, the fishing was insane. The guides, all of whom by local ordinance have to be from the villages that were flooded to make the lake (don’t worry, they were all compensated and relocated), could simply beat the bank and lead you to one fish after another after another.

Joe Cermele, the fishing editor of Field & Stream, is someone I want to hate but I just can’t do it.

I knew Terry Baksay even before I really knew Terry Baksay.