ON TOUR
T-H MARINE FLW BASS FISHING LEAGUE detaIls
June 1-3, 2017 hosted by florence / lauderdale tourism
DEAKINS DOMINATES ALL-AMERICAN
TENNESSEE PRO WINS BIG AT PICKWICK LAKE
By David A. Brown photo by Jesse schultz
One of the defining marks of an experienced angler is the ability to look at vast opportunity, chisel out a manageable chunk and devote full attention to doing well in the narrowly defined area. Such was the case for Marshall Deakins, who played a conservative game and won the T-H Marine FLW Bass Fishing League All-American hosted by Florence / Lauderdale Tourism on Pickwick Lake with a three-day total weight of 60 pounds, 6 ounces.
A Tennessee River impoundment, Pickwick Lake covers 47,500 surface acres and stretches 53 miles from the Pickwick Landing Dam to Wilson Dam.
In between are ledges, creeks, coves and various types of shallow cover. And although he had a lot of area from which to choose, Deakins opted to narrow down his target zone to about a five-mile stretch that reached from the Kroger Island area to just below the Natchez Trace Bridge on Pickwick’ s upper third.
“ I looked up and down the river from the [ Pickwick Landing ] dam to this area [ the Florence, Ala., takeoff site ], and I could see big schools, but when I turned around, I couldn’ t catch them,” Deakins says of his pre-practice.“ Then, on our official practice day, I decided I wasn’ t going to run around and look anymore. I was just going to hit the spots we got bit on [ in pre-practice ], and if I got a bite I was going to leave. I found four or five places where I got a bite, and those are the ones I keyed on in the tournament.”
Time management was the main strategy here. With a relatively small area of focus, he didn’ t burn too much time when he felt he needed to rotate.
Although he would fish a handful of locations throughout his target area, Deakins wound up finding all of his keepers on two key spots. The first was a 50-yard stretch of river ledge below
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FLWFISHING. COM I AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2017