Bass Fishing Aug - Sept 2017 | Page 92

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