and other anchoring capabilities on
trolling motors are now “must-haves”
for professional anglers. But Cox has
bucked the GPS trolling motor movement
as well, preferring to stick with the
tried-and-true cable-steer foot pedal.
Also, don’t look for many rods to be
on his deck during a tournament.
“Since I didn’t install rod straps on
my boat, I can only handle three to five
rods out on the deck at a time,” he once
reasoned.
On those rods, you will find nothing
fancy, either: a swim jig, a vibrating jig, a
wacky rig, a frog and occasionally a shallow-running
crankbait. All baits
designed to fish about 6 feet or less.
Considering his old-school
approach, it doesn’t seem possible that
Cox could win as much as he has against
an armada with a glass, graphing and
global positioning advantage. But in
order to better understand the method
to his madness, you have to step into
Cox’s boat.
As a kid, Cox grew up stalking bass in
the small ponds of central Florida. He cut
his teeth fishing in a 12-foot john boat.
“It was actually an aluminum rowboat,”
Cox recalls. “My uncle built a
wooden front deck in it. I used to fish the
john boat league around home.”
From that grew a passion for watching
and observing how bass behave in
shallow water, especially in vegetation.
He became consumed with fooling visible
bass into biting, not just during the
spawn, but at all times of the year.
While his contemporaries mastered
side-scanning and “video-gaming” to
depths of 30 feet, Cox stayed consumed
with small crafts, neck-deep “salad
bowl” lakes, and lures that closely
resembled bream and other sunfish forage
in the shallows.
Over time, his Power-Poles became
his depth-finder, his eyes became his
fish-finder and his rod became his
cover-finder. Through his lures, Cox
knows the feel of hydrilla versus peppergrass
versus eelgrass. His brain timestamps
when one vegetation turns to
another and forms a seam. He fishes to
find gaps, grooves, sandbars and those
magical “voids” in vegetation that electronics
don’t always see. No matter what
lake Cox fishes, he searches out these
shallow, shrouded locales; places that
lack eye-catching contour detail or are
not on GPS mapping at all.
Cox is especially attuned to any small
condition changes that might create vulnerability
among his quarry: the sun
going behind a cloud, a sudden breeze
that ripples shallow voids in vegetation,
a band of slightly clearer water seeping
out of a marshy backwater. As of now,
no fishing instruments can be bought to
alert anglers to such condition changes.
One lapse in judgment from a single
bass to boil on Cox’s offering and the
colony’s cover has been blown.
Suddenly, all the snippets snap into
place for Cox in an obscure location that
is far from the draft of bigger boats and
out of range of sonar pings.
Indeed, fishing from Cox’s boat is
seeing the fishing world from a different
platform. It’s a little old-school and a little
unconventional at the same time, but
it works for him, making Cox’s boat a
refreshing reminder that no matter
where you fish or what you fish for, just
do what you do.
JUNE-JULY 2020 | MAJORLEAGUEFISHING.COM | FLWFISHING.COM 23