CONDITIONS
Weather | mostly sunny with light wind the first three days; overcast and
calm on the final day
air temperature | mid-50s to low 80s
Water temperature | low 70s
moon phase | waxing to full
predominant lake features | residential canals, various emergent and sub-
mergent grasses, and shell beds
hydrilla off the tip of the same island
during one evening of practice.
“I was actually running in at dusk,
and I ran over a big clump that just
came up out of nowhere,” he says. “I hit
a waypoint on it and kept going. So as I
fished down the side of the island [in
the tournament], I decided to work my
way out to the point where I had
marked that clump. As soon as I got
near my waypoint, I caught a 7-
pounder and 5-pounder on back-to-
back casts.”
As Dortch continued to work his way
around the clump, he discovered there
were actually two clumps split by a gap.
“If I cast right between the two
clumps, I could work a trap through
there clean,” he says. “If my cast landed
anywhere else, it bogged down imme-
diately. It was like a single-cast deal.
That’s where the big bites came from.”
The two big fish anchored Dortch’s
21-pound, 2-ounce catch on day two to
move him into fifth place.
“In my mind that was the bite to
beat,” he says. “I had some good bites
that way in practice, so that’s the way I
had planned to start the tournament.”
Dortch stuck with his pad-pitching
game all through day one, weighing in
15 pounds, 4 ounces to start the event
in 29th place.
On day two, he fished pads again,
but by 1 o’ clock he only had three fish
in the livewell and his patience was
wearing thin. Plus, a generous breeze
was tempting him away from the pads
toward offshore hydrilla.
“Pitching those pads is so slow. I was
going out of my mind,” Dortch explains.
“I got so bored with it. I finally pulled the
trolling motor and ran to a stretch of
hydrilla near an island in Harris to
throw a trap [lipless crankbait] for a
change of pace. I was hoping the wind
might help that bite.”
As Dortch ripped a lipless rattler in
scattered hydrilla along the island, he
remembered marking a big clump of
POSTSPAWN PATTERNS
DOMINATED TOP 10
Bradley Dortch won the FLW
Tour event presented by Ranger
on the Harris Chain of Lakes by
switching from a spawn pattern to
a postspawn pattern in the mid-
dle of the tournament. He was
not alone in his assessment that
the spawn was going away fast.
The only pro to make the top
10 totally by sight-fishing was
John Cox, who led the first three
days, but fell behind on day four
and finished third. The rest of the
top 10 either started the tourna-
ment fishing offshore for
postspawn bass or switched to
postspawn patterns midway.
Palm Bay’s JT Kenney finished
runner-up thanks to a massive
27-pound, 3-ounce limit on the
final day.
“I had a couple of decent days
pitching pads,” Kenney says, “but
on day three I only caught 10
pounds doing it. That’s when I
knew that pattern was toast. So
the last day, I took a gamble on
some offshore shell beds I had
found during practice over on
Griffin, and it was on.”
Shane LeHew, who finished
fourth, also started the event on
spawning fish but ended it fishing
out for schoolers. Matt Reed fin-
ished fifth by Carolina rigging off-
shore shell beds.
Dortch pitched a soft stick bait up shallow around lily pad stems for his spawning fish.
may-june 2017 I flWfIshIng.com
77