COLUMN
FOR THE RECORD
COLIN
MOORE
I
16
Who’s Gonna Win?
f things run true to form, the out-
come of the 2018 Forrest Wood Cup
will be decided by a drop-shot rig, or
a frog, or a crankbait, or a spinnerbait,
or a jig, or a topwater bait, or none of
the above. It will be claimed by some-
body who hasn’t won before, by an
angler using finesse tactics or power
fishin g, who stays in one place or flits
around Lake Ouachita on a daily milk
run. The winner will be a seasoned vet-
eran or a talented newcomer who finds
himself in the right place at the right
time and knows what to do. The win-
ning pattern will be there for all to see,
but he’ll be the one to unlock it and
exploit it best.
Envisioning how the championship
will unfold is nigh impossible because
none has ever followed the scripts writ-
ten by its predecessors. That’s not to
say there aren’t some certainties.
Because the tournament is held in the
heat of summer, fishing options are
reduced. The bass are either in deeper
water, schooling and occasionally feed-
ing on passing baitfish, or they’re in the
shade of docks and shallow cover, wait-
ing to ambush something. There’s not
much left in between. When practice
starts, everybody hopes to find the
magic bullet, but there seldom has
been one. Instead, slogging it out with a
variety of lures and approaches has
been the standard.
Home-lake advantage? That only
works on fisheries that see little nation-
al tournament action. Until Jason
Lambert came along, nobody really
could be called a pre-tournament
favorite on Kentucky Lake, much less
Lake Guntersville. Places like Lake
Chatuge or Cross Lake are different sto-
ries. Lake Ouachita is somewhere in the
middle, which doesn’t make it any easi-
er to predict who might have an edge
there.
Then, too, even when a competitor
is on fish the first day, he might discover
that subsequently they’ve moved hori-
zontally or vertically from where he first
found them, that there might not be
enough bass where he’s fishing to hold
up for three days, or that somewhere
during the event he should have zigged
instead of zagging.
Impossible to predict
No Cup has played out quite like the
prognosticators or FLW Fantasy Fishing
gurus figured it would, and all have had
their unique touches that separate
them from the rest.
Lake Lanier, 2010, Kevin Hawk: Who
knew? He came out of nowhere to win.
He fished the same pattern that just
about everybody else was going for,
though going about it a bit differently.
Hawk alternated a Fish Head Spin
trailed with a white Zoom Super Fluke
Jr. with a drop-shot rig baited with a 6-
inch Roboworm in the ubiquitous
morning dawn color. Fishing the lake’s
deep-water brush piles, Hawk caught a
50-pound, 14-ounce stringer.
Two years later on Lake Lanier,
Jacob Wheeler did just the opposite of
what most everyone else was doing to
catch a winning bag of 60-1. Eschewing
the finesse tactics that had worked for
Hawk and the top anglers in 2010,
Wheeler flipped shallow-water cover up
the Chattahoochee River with a Trigger
X Goo Bug or cast a Rapala X-Rap Prop,
vibrating jig and Rapala Skitter Walk
around docks and wherever he spotted
concentrations of bluegills. At times, he
also fished a shaky head with a Trigger
X Flutter Worm. Wheeler winning with a
bunch of different baits is more the rule
than the exception in Cup history. Lots
of lures get called into service.
That makes Justin Atkins’ win in his
first full season last year all the more
remarkable. He caught all 15 fish that
he weighed in on a chrome ima Little
Stick 135 pencil popper.
Likewise, David Dudley relied on a
homemade spinnerbait to win the 2003
Cup on the James River, and Luke
Clausen claimed the championship the
following year at Logan Martin by skip-
ping 4-inch finesse worms under docks.
Nothing fancy, but it worked.
On the flip side, Scott Martin used
an arsenal when he captured the title at
Ouachita in 2011 with 61-1. His most
productive lures were a Yamamoto
swimbait mounted on a Fish Head Spin,
a hollow swimbait on a 7/16-ounce
head, a 10-inch ribbon-tail worm and a
Roboworm (morning dawn or water-
melon candy red) on a drop-shot rig.
For added advantage, Martin also dyed
the worms’ tails chartreuse.
Scott Suggs was a bit more conser-
vative when he triumphed with a deep-
water pattern at Ouachita in 2007.
Suggs relied on three baits during the
week: a 3/4-ounce War Eagle spinner-
bait featuring a “firecracker-colored”
skirt and holographic blades, a Berkley
10-inch PowerBait Power Worm in
plum and a Zoom worm in cherry seed.
Going Shallow
Ouachita is another of those lakes
where the winning sack of fish might be
caught shallow or deep, or both. Brad
FLWFISHING.COM I auGuSt-SepteMber 2018