“I didn’t know it was in Pickwick until
practice when I found it,” says the sec-
ond-year Tour pro. “Then I started
going back upriver from where I found
it, because when you find some usually
you can move upriver and find more.”
He did, and Gross began exploiting
the wavy clumps of long, green leaves.
Whether the bass preferred the eel-
grass as a current break, forage
ambush site or some other reason,
Gross didn’t care. In the tournament, he
mined the spot over four days for 20
bass weighing more than 74 pounds to
claim his first Tour championship.
Gross figures eelgrass has been in
Guntersville, or the upriver Crow Creek
tributary of it, for at least 20 years. That
coincides with weekend tournament
anglers locating it in the early 2000s
near the B. B. Comer Bridge area not far
from Scottsboro, Ala., and Goosepond
Colony.
Now, eelgrass is expanding its
range, and anglers are learning ways to
tap into its bass-fishing potential.
The Expansion
Eelgrass is a native grass that’s com-
mon throughout the country. Its growth
in the Tennessee is probably a sign of
overall improvement in water quality in
the system. But will eelgrass take to
other Tennessee River lakes as it has in
Guntersville? Fluctuating seasonal water
levels might prevent it from taking hold
to a great degree. Wheeler, the next lake
below Guntersville, has potential as evi-
denced by its spotty, decades-old histo-
ry with milfoil or hydrilla downstream of
the Decatur stump flats. Pickwick has it,
and Gross already has seen it in
Chickamauga, too.
He says that originally the eelgrass he
found in Guntersville was growing in areas
where hydrilla and milfoil were absent.
“Now it seems to be growing all over,”
he says. “It’s growing in deeper areas,
and I think the lack of rain and current
the last few years changed a lot of things,
too. It seems to grow in a harder bottom
because it likes current. It’ll grow in the
bottoms of the ditches a lot of times.”
FLW Tour pro Braxton Setzer, who
has a degree in fisheries manag