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.

By now many of you have likely seen the Savage Gear 3D Bat, which one the Best Freshwater Hard Lure award at the recently-concluded ICAST trade show. The web and social media have been filled with snickering and criticism about this bait, and perhaps rightfully so, but today I’m here to announce that I fully intend to acquire one.

I’ve been blogging here at Inside Line for nearly a decade, and it’s rare that I take the time to step back and assess what this forum has meant to my writing career. Nearly everything good that has happened to me since that beginning stems either directly or indirectly from this space.

Just prior to announcing their 2018 Elite Series schedule, B.A.S.S. announced a new rule that would prohibit qualified anglers “from soliciting or intentionally receiving any information about the locations of fish or fishing areas on those waters,” beginning as soon as the schedule was made public. As Randall Tharp wrote, this should “level the playing field,” favoring the best anglers over the best information gatherers.

If you’ve read this blog for any period of time then you know that I’m a big advocate of putting new waters on the schedule. If I had my way, they’d sign ‘em up for 10 or 11 complete wild cards, and while I know that isn’t feasible for a variety of financial and outrage-based reasons, I’m always happy when the pros get to go someplace new. That’s why I’m so excited by the presence of Lake Oahe on the schedule at the end of June.

I’ve read the articles and seen the TV shows. Alabama anglers head down a line of shoreline water willow throwing a swim jig and as they retrieve it they go into full spaz mode, twitching and shaking their rod tip. All of a sudden the rod loads up, the angler stops shaking and starts reeling and a five pound green gorilla is brought over the side of the boat.

When Yamamoto introduced the Kreature over a decade ago, I was immediately enthralled. It was the perfect size, came in lots of killer colors, and looked sexier than any other plastic in my boat. Most importantly, it caught lots of fish, whether I sought them in buck brush at Buggs Island, under grass and docks on the Potomac, or around pads and cypress knees on the Chickahominy. Then a strange thing happened – I more or less forgot about it.

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.