Winning Ways
college
U. OF LOUISIANA-MONROE
BETHEL UNIVERSITY
TUSCULUM COLLEGE
ADRIAN COLLEGE
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA
NORTHWESTERN STATE
ADRIAN COLLEGE
MURRAY STATE UNIVERSITY
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI
The key to their success, admits Freeman, was largely a
matter of staying around the food. In the Little Jungle, they
saw a lot of big gizzard shad and often picked up a keeper
directly following a flurry of bass-on-shad violence. In the
area where they fished the third day, shad were flipping peri-
odically, and bass could be seen chasing the baitfish from
time to time.
The ULM anglers left the Little Jungle with two Carolina
rig fish – one they’d later cull with the same bait in another
backwater on the way back to check-in, and one that
grabbed a 5/16-ounce spinnerbait with gold and silver wil-
low-leaf blades and a cole slaw skirt (white, chartreuse and
orange).
“I was throwing a bigger spinnerbait in pre-practice, but it
was so tough that last day, I threw a finesse spinnerbait,”
Freeman notes. “If you can’t get bit, I always say, ‘Go small.’
That one I caught on day three was the first one we caught
on a spinnerbait in the tournament.”
The jig, Freeman adds, was the right call on day three for
mimicking the profile of the small bluegills clustering around
WeIght
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fIsh
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the boat ramp and along the seawall, while still maintaining
some crawfish detail.
Earlier, as well as on days one and two, the Carolina rig
proved itself as a dependable producer of fish. The winners
rigged their Carolina rigs with cylinder weights of thin diame-
ter, because they slid through the cover better than egg
weights. Both anglers still hung up a few times and ended up
breaking off multiple rigs, but their mantra being “fish where
the fish are,” they considered it the cost of doing business
with Red River bass.
team
1. THOMAS SOILEAU & HUNTER FREEMAN
2. GARRETT ENDERS & CODY HUFF
3. NICK HATFIELD & COREY NEECE
4. NICHOLAS CZA JKA & JACK HIPPE III
5. CHARLIE DESHAZER & JACKSON EBBERS
6. HUNTER MALMAY & ROBERT JONES
7. CHASE SERAFIN & CODY BATTERSON
8. NICK MONTILINO & BROCK SPENCER
9. MICHAEL DUNN & HENRY COLBERG
10. GABRIEL DUBOIS & BRANDON HEIZER
the champs square off
august-september 2018 I flWfIshIng.com
A day after being rewarded for their combined efforts,
Freeman and Soileau competed against one another in a
Fish-Off inside the bay at Red River South Marina. Off limits
during the tournament, this oxbow presented a diverse
array of habitat features that made for two very different
game plans.
Soileau kept it simple and enjoyed a day of steady produc-
tivity with a Texas-rigged Big Bite Baits Fighting Frog (black
neon), a 5/16-ounce shaky head with a green pumpkin Zoom
Finesse Worm and a Strike King 1.5 square-bill (sexy shad)
fished around shallow wood along the bay’s southeastern
end, mostly near the mouth.
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