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.

When I was in college in New York City 30 years ago, friends and I would venture down to Hester Street once or twice a semester to engage in what Eater NY called “the faux Little Italy experience.”

The one problem with the overwhelming catch and release ethic in bass fishing is that we don’t always know exactly what the fish we catch have been eating. Of course we occasionally find a shad tail sticking out of the throat of a freshly-caught largemouth, and many of us have found crawfish or small, partially-digested bluegills in our livewells, but even when one forage is dominant, it’s not always what they’re chewing on.

It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that throughout most of the history of professional bass fishing the anglers have been fishing primarily to win their own money. Most fans, and (assumedly) all the anglers thought that this needed to be changed.

Autumn is usually a slow time for news in the bass fishing world, but this year is an aberration. Those of us who care about these things have been provided an embarrassingly rich news feed as the sport has undergone what appears likely to be a massive change.

In 2001, just after OMC (then-manufacturer of Johnson and Evinrude outboards) went belly-up, I was scheduled to spend a tournament practice day with Missouri pro Chad Brauer. As we trolling-motored away from the Jolly Roger Marina on the upper end of stumpy Toledo Bend, his father Denny yelled out, “Try not to break anything.”

Over the past dozen years my writing has opened doors that enabled me to experience all sorts of incredible fishing trips. I’ve fished for peacock bass in the Amazon (twice, with a third trip on the schedule), tigerfish on Africa’s Lower Zambezi River, redfish in Venice and cutthroat trout in Montana. I’ve spent three days practicing with KVD on the California Delta and multiple days on St. Clair with a two-time PMTT Champion. I’ve taken off my shoes to fish in AMart’s boat on a private lake in Georgia, and I was there to see Rick Clunn’s most recent victory at the St. Johns. Last year I made a trip to East Texas where I got to fish with four different Classic qualifiers (Keith Combs, Clark Reehm, Albert Collins and Lonnie Stanley) on three exceptional lakes – when two great days on Rayburn are the least productive days of the five, you can call it a trip of a lifetime.

Basszone.com published a great story on Wednesday about Steve Kennedy’s U.S. Open effort. On a per-mile-driven basis, the Alabama pro did not make out particularly well in Vegas, but if you judge based on per-hour-practiced, he likely lapped the field.

Last Thursday, the New York Times published a lengthy (approximately 3,000 words) feature on the state of bass fishing titled “This Is the Most Lucrative Moment in History to Catch Bass.” The writer, Haley Cohen Gilliland, previously of mega-serious and prestigious publications like The Economist and Vanity Fair, did a fantastic job with what is likely a difficult topic for people outside of our orbit to understand.

Welcome to Professional Bass Fishing Jeopardy, where we skip the easy questions and go straight into Final Jeopardy.