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Lambert never makes a cast on the Tennessee River
without seeing fish on his graph. Period.
“I’m not going to waste my time,” he says.
But when he does cast, he’s not particular about which
direction he’s casting. He knows that tactic diverges from
some common ledge-fishing beliefs, but he’s also got the
trophy case to back him up.
“A lot of people think you have to set up downcurrent
and throw up at a school. I don’t think that’s true,” says
Lambert. “If I’m idling toward a school of fish and I’m on the
upcurrent side, that’s where I throw from. Sure, you can
work around a school sometimes and try to make them bite
from different angles, but as long as I know they are there,
that’s what I’m worried about. I was fishing the winning
school at Kentucky Lake from the ‘wrong’ side, and they
weren’t biting from the ‘right’ side.”
That suggests another facet of bass behavior Lambert
has noticed time and again. Ledge fish move around, and
an angler shouldn’t hesitate to move around, too.
“Once those fish get a little pressure on them, they will
move around a ledge,” he adds. “At Kentucky Lake, where I
won last year, the biggest key to me winning was knowing
that they move around. The first two days I was catching
fish out of groups of six instead of groups of 100. They had
moved around because of the pressure, and I was basically
fishing the perimeters of where the schools were. It’s some-
thing I learned at Pickwick, and that’s how I crushed them at
Kentucky. I ran hole after hole after hole until I finally got a
school fired up, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I
didn’t know where they were.”
FLWFISHING.COM I MAY-JUNE 2017