The Inside Line

Located near the town of Russellville, Arkansas is Lake Dardanelle — a large pool on the Arkansas River. It covers roughly 40,000 surface acres, and it’s full of prime bass-breeding habitat.

I love this lake because the fish stay shallow most of the year … and they usually bite!

The Tour’s sixth stop was The Mississippi River (pools 7, 8 and 9) out of La Crosse, WI. The Mississippi is well known for its plentiful cover such as wood, wing dams, vegetation, backwater pools and docks. Our first day of practice found Jimmy and me with no bites, so we decided to make a run. We quickly found ourselves on a sand bar, stuck high and dry. Luckily, fellow Yamamoto pro Darrel Robertson happened by and pulled us out. (Thanks, Darrel!)

After the bass spawn, some stay shallow and some head to deeper water immediately.  Knowing whether you should fish shallow or deep is the big debate for me and I have learned that it usually boils down to water clarity and shallow cover.

Ross Barnett Reservoir covers approximately 33,000 surface acres. That’s considerably smaller in comparison to the other fisheries our tour visits.

Having competed there years ago, I knew it would be difficult to find fishable waters to myself.

Our fourth stop on this year’s FLW Tour was Lake Cumberland in Burnside, KY. Cumberland is a huge, clear water reservoir and the main lake is over a 100 miles long. 

There are multitudes of creeks with bushes and standing trees as well as main lake areas with big rock and standing trees. It’s pretty easy on the eyes, too. The lake is very vertical with few flat areas.  All three species of bass can be found here but there are minimums to take into account: an 18" minimum for smallmouth, 15" for largemouth and 12" for spotted bass. The fish were fat and in pre-spawn but with the smallmouth requiring an 18" minimum length, you sometimes ended up toss back a fish that weighs 3 pounds or more. Ouch!

When I first saw Toledo Bend on the schedule, I have to admit, I wasn’t too excited. Even though it’s been voted the best bass lake in America the past two years running, I somehow find a way to miss out on all the action.

The 2017 Bassmaster Elite Series schedule is diverse and full of great fisheries across the country. In this piece I'm previewing the second half of the events of the 2017 season and making my predictions for the patterns and weight needed to win.

While some portion of pro anglers are likely to find problems in any changes to tournament rules or procedure, one of the recent FLW developments that I really think is smart is the addition of the Wednesday “off day” to the tournament schedule. They practice Sunday-Monday-Tuesday, take care of off-the-water business on Wednesday, and start the tournament on the normal Thursday.

The good news about having the pros visit your home waters is that it might clue you in on what’s going on out there.

The bad news about having the pros visit your home waters is that it might clue everybody in on what’s going on out there.

When decades from now they conduct an autopsy and cut Bryan Thrift’s brain open, I suspect they’ll find a scrolling ticker tape that spits out the combined results of four 12-inch graphs and the solunar tables.

Carl Svebek was wacky-worming when wacky-worming was neither cool nor popular, and he has a bin full of Sweebo worms to show for it. Then he did the old Rip Van Fishkle on us and disappeared for a while, and now he’s headed to the Classic.

If Jordan Lee’s Classic win wasn’t enough, then maybe you were convinced by Jesse Wiggins or Dustin Connell or Alton Jones Jr., but this is clearly a year when youth has come to play.

For a person who generally prefers to be alone and has made it his life’s goal to incubate the skills of a curmudgeon, I have some pretty great friends, and most of them I’ve met through fishing.

At Anglers Inn El Salto, the guides fully expect to land every one of the many fish you’ll catch. I don’t really roll like that, so my general rule is to land all fish caught on single-hooked lures myself, unless they are net-worthy, and to leave the vast majority of fish caught on treble hooked lures to them.

I don’t know much about what makes a good swimbait, but to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart I know one when I fish one. That’s why I’m pretty excited about the heads from Tennessee’s Ledgehead Lures – if my initial experimentation with them is any indication, they’ve got something good going on.

Since we don’t live on the Tennessee River or some other classic ledge lake, Hanna and I don’t get a lot of chances to catch two fish on one bait on a single cast. I’ve done it once in my life in Virginia, landing two 1-pound non keepers on a Rat-L-Trap while practicing for a tournament at Smith Mountain Lake.