ON TOUR
FLW TOUR
FLW TOUR | LAKE ST. CLAIR
HARRISON TOWNSHIP, MICH.
By Sean Ostruszka
WINNING ANGLER
chad grigsby
Maple Grove, Minn.
Winning Weight:
97-08 (20 fish)
details:
June 28-July 1, 2018
presented by Mercury
the area
82
Grigsby grew up in Michigan, but now calls Minnesota
home. He says he hadn’t actually fished St. Clair for nearly a
decade prior to practice. Still, plenty of previous experi-
ences pointed him in the right direction on the huge
expanse of water.
“There’s no structure hardly anywhere on the lake,” Grigsby
says. “You’re basically looking for the right ingredients.”
Those ingredients were clear water, isolated patches of
grass with “veins” of sand running through them and plenty
of bait. On day two of practice he found a 1/8-mile stretch
on the southern Canadian side about midway between the
Belle River Hump area and the mouth of the Detroit River. It
was 16 to 19 feet deep and had what he was looking for.
“There was just more bait there than anywhere else I
found,” adds Grigsby.
the pattern
St. Clair can seem to be a hopelessly random lake, with
no structure or anything to pinpoint. This is only amplified
when dealing with more than 400 square miles of water
and fishing many miles from shore.
With so much water to cover, an angler’s usual fishing
style involves getting in a prime area and either drifting or
searching around with the trolling motor until he get bites.
While the bites can seem indiscriminate, often they’re not.
“Any time I got bit I marked a waypoint,” Grigsby says.
“After a while I’d zoom out on my electronics and see clus-
ters of where I was consistently getting bit. So I’d go back
and forth, hitting those high-percentage areas.”
Though Grigsby fished near Hays and Knight, he had his
best stretch to himself, which was a critical component. But
what really set him apart was how he adapted throughout
the event.
flWfIshIng.com I august-september 2018
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had Grigsby fished Lake St. Clair often for the first 30
years or so of his life. So he knew how good the fish-
ery could be.
Yet neither he nor anyone else could predict how amaz-
ing the fishing would be at the final stop of the 2018 FLW
Tour season.
“Slugfest” doesn’t even begin to describe the fishing. The
field brought in the second heaviest single-day weight in a
Tour event on day one, and broke the record for cumulative
weight in the first two days of a Tour event. Pros toted back
75 20-pound bags, and 18 pounds didn’t even get guys pats
on the back. And amazingly, it was done with smallmouths.
All that weight made for an interesting final round, as
Grigsby, Dylan Hays and Brad Knight were separated by less
than 2 pounds at the start of day four’s finale. Making it
even more interesting was they were all keyed in on a simi-
lar area, leading to Hays prognosticating that whoever
caught more than 25 pounds would win.
Sure enough, Grigsby brought in 26 pounds, 4 ounces to
take the victory, while Hays brought in 23-2 and Knight
weighed 21-15.
hosted by detroit
Sports Commission,
Macomb County,
huron-Clinton
Metroparks Authority
and Sterling heights
Regional Chamber of
Commerce