The Inside Line

After an exhaustive week of competition on the St. Lawrence River, I made the drive to Lake Champlain — site of our seventh Elite Series event.

Arriving in the village of Plattsburgh, NY shortly after sunset, I caught up with fellow Florida pro Cliff Prince and his family. They had booked a room for me at a low budget motel on the outskirts of town, and though it was rough, it would serve as interim lodging until we could move into our lakeside cabin for the remainder of the week.

Each year on the Bassmaster Elite Series we travel to some of the best smallmouth bass fisheries in the world. This year we went to the St. Lawrence River and Lake Champlain. Both have excellent smallmouth fishing and I love going to those places, but maybe not for the reasons you would expect, I like to chase northern largemouth. These waters are excellent for largemouth and they often receive far less pressure than the smallmouth. I have had success and failure this year chasing the green fish, but it is how I like to fish when I head north.

Whenever our tour visits the St. Lawrence River, I know my chances for success are strong. I’ve been fishing there for decades, and in that time I’ve experienced all types of conditions. I was looking forward to this event more than any other on the schedule.

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!

No matter how regular and gastrointestinally disciplined you are, if you fish enough eventually you are going to run into an unexpected and inopportune case of the green apple quick step.

Apparently it is “Pain and Suffering Week” here at Pete Weighs In, because after writing twice about injuries caused and worsened by fishing (see here and here) I am headed north to St. Clair to chase muskies for the second time in a month.

Over the course of 25 Major League seasons, Rickey Henderson stole a record 1,406 bases. Even assuming that he occasionally hit the bag standing up, that means that on well over a thousand occasions. Henderson slid into the bag, sometimes on hard astroturf, sometimes on slightly more forgiving natural grass. Henderson, who liked to refer to himself in the third person and also preferred to slide headfirst, beat his body up en route to the Hall of Fame.

For the better part of 20 years, I didn’t care about any other fish but bass. I chased nothing else, thought about nothing else, and when I accidentally caught some other species I considered it little more than a nuisance. As my tournament career ended and my travels ramped up, that changed.

I have a lot of tackle, probably more than I could use in three lifetimes across five continents, and yet I keep acquiring more. It’s a drug, one that never fails to give me a high, sometimes more than one, but the thrills rarely sustain themselves. I always need another fix.

Last week Mike Bucca (AKA, Triton Mike or Bubba Bull Rat), put up a Facebook posts asking his friends to identify their “favorite tackle shop and why.”One hundred seventeen comments later, I’m now aware of a lot of good shops that I’d not previously heard about.

I just spent two days chasing muskies on Lake St. Clair, with my second day on the water overlapping with the first day of Elite Series practice on the big lake. For all of my time at B.A.S.S. events, I don’t think I’ve been on the water with the competitors since they eliminated co-anglers from Elite competition almost a decade ago, so I’m not aware of prevailing practices and habits.

A few years ago I joined a friend for a trip to the boat dealer as he prepared to order 20 feet of fiberglass priced over $60,000. He had a very detailed list of options that he wanted, and I sat semi-quietly as he led the dealer through his preferred build.