The Inside Line

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.

Last Sunday my wife and I both woke up at 4am. We got out of bed, brushed our teeth, applied sunscreen together, and then got into separate vehicles. We met at the convenience store, and then again at the boat ramp, where we got into separate Bass Cats and headed in opposite directions.

Here’s what I learned about guiding over the past weekend: The guide’s life is not for me.

The beauty of the internet is that it has democratized information, and of course this applies to the fishing industry. Whether you caught your first bluegill last week or you just cashed a second consecutive Bassmaster Classic check, you can learn in short order from a chair what took prior generations hundreds of hours on the water to figure out.

I have a friend from Texas coming here Friday night with the goal of catching a Potomac River snakehead. He’s someone who has helped me tremendously since the earliest stages of my outdoor writing career, when he was the pro-staff manager of a major rod company, and I was some guy just struggling to get published.

One of my many pet peeves on the water is being stuck fishing around a major league chatterbox, the type of angler who carries on a breathless monologue as he casts.

First, congrats are in order for MDJ, who won what might’ve been the purest test in recent Elite Series history, conquering over a hundred plus mostly grizzled hammers on a venue that was essentially new to all of them.

While downing ice cold Pacificos at El Salto back in January, my friend TJ Maglio and I got to talking about the state of the Potomac River. TJ had lived here for a few years before retreating to Madison, Wisconsin, and then to La Crosse, even further into Cheeseland.

I love this time of year, when there are back-to-back Elite Series tournaments with an overlapping FLW Tour derby on a premier smallmouth fishery for good measure. It’s an abundance of riches for pro bassing freaks like me, with not quite enough personal bandwidth to give it all the attention it deserves.

“I'd rather be dead than singing 'Satisfaction' when I'm 45.”

--Mick Jagger