TAKEOFF
SCENARIOS
BRENT ANDERSON’S AUTUMN
APPROACH ON THE TENNESSEE
T
TOPWATER TACTICS FOR BASS GOBBLING GIZZARD SHAD
30
he first time Brent Anderson put
together Kentucky Lake’s gizzard
shad-topwater bass puzzle hap-
pened by chance. It was early autumn
2011, and the school of grass bass he
had been pounding on all summer had
recently vanished after the greenery
finally died.
Convinced the mega-school had to
be around the area somewhere,
Anderson ventured from his waypoint
and started working along a shallow
main-lake bar.
“This huge gizzard shad comes up
out of the water on top of the bar,” he
recalls. “I rolled up there, and it turned
out there was this big school of bass up
there, and they were eating topwater.”
Anderson remembered that day the
next season, when he was hunting for
fish prior to a fall tournament on
Kentucky Lake.
By Curtis Niedermier
“I went to that waypoint, and I ended
up catching 28 pounds,” he says.
A week later, with a topwater bait in
hand and a handful of similar “shallow
bar” spots marked with waypoints,
Anderson earned the first in a long string
of autumn tournament victories on
Kentucky Lake that garnered him the nick-
name “Mr. September” throughout the
Tennessee River Valley. The list includes
four wins in multi-day T-H Marine FLW
FLWFISHING.COM I OCTOBER 2017