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bass, and support a boatload of “fruit
jar” tournaments. The fish are seldom
cooperative, and an angler has to devel-
op a solid set of skills to catch bass from
them consistently – just the kind of chal-
lenging proving grounds for up-and-
coming fishermen.
“They weren’t great lakes,” Floyd says
of his original home waters. “The fishing
was tough. Sometimes we’d go to Lake
Erie or the Ohio River, but we mostly
fished those two lakes.”
While those small lakes were perfect
places to start a career, Floyd soon
found himself learning the secrets of
bass fishing on two of the most storied
fisheries in the sport – Kentucky Lake
and Lake Guntersville.
Years before the FLW spotlight
began to shine on him, Cole Floyd
shared the front deck of his father
Steve’s Ranger with his two brothers,
Dalton, 22, and Wyatt, 18. There, the
Floyd boys would spend summer days
flipping Kentucky Lake’s shallow bushes
with their dad, an accomplished tourna-
ment fisherman who’s fished more than
120 FLW Tour, Costa FLW Series and
BFL events since 1995 and scored top-
10 finishes in more than a fourth of
them. In June, Steve placed 23rd in the
same Costa event where his middle son
finished second.
Fishing Kentucky Lake, about 400 miles
southwest from Paint Creek and Rocky
Fork, was a vacation of sorts over the years
for the Floyds. Whenever they could, the
family would burn a path down the
Western Kentucky Parkway to Paris, Tenn.
Eventually, dad’s lessons taught in
the grass beds, brush piles and bank
cover at Kentucky Lake would merge
with others from another Floyd outpost
on the Tennessee River farther south-
east: Lake Guntersville.
“That’s where I learned to ledge fish,”
Cole says of Guntersville. “For about 10
years, my brothers and I would go down
there and stay with my grandma during
spring break. I kind of taught myself
how to ledge fish out there. It was
ridiculous at first. I only used down-
imaging. I had no idea what side-imag-
ing was for, and I’d spend hours out
there just idling around trying to learn
how to read graphs.”
Guntersville wore a groove in Cole’s
mind. In one stretch at age 15, he spent
40 days graphing, learning and fishing
the big lake in the Alabama hills. Every
trip south meant another opportunity
to grow, and he seized as many chances
as he could.
The Tennessee River has shaped Floyd’s skill set, from flipping bushes to fishing ledges.
The FLW Trail
Back home in Ohio, Cole skipped the
high school fishing circuit, but kept fish-
ing local derbies, using the lessons
learned on his home lakes as well as
Guntersville and Kentucky Lake to claim
his fair share of victories. All the while, his
family spent a lot of time cruising up and
down the Western Kentucky Parkway.
“We kept going back to Kentucky
Lake,” Cole says. “My parents bought a
house in Paris [Tenn.], and when it came
time to go to college, I knew I wanted to
be by the lake.”
The lure of Bethel University’s high-
profile fishing team drew him to nearby
McKenzie, Tenn. Now, he’s juggling class-
es in business management with the
school’s collegiate bass fishing program,
the BFL trail and the Costa FLW Series.
Cole says the winnings – more than
$30,000 this year, so far – are all going
back into college expenses and tourna-
ment entry fees.
“The ultimate goal is to fish profes-
sionally for a living,” he says. “If I can’t get
there, I want to use that business degree
to land a job in the fishing industry.”
Of course, it’s a long, winding road
from those nondescript Ohio lakes off of
Highway 50, but if Cole’s star continues
to rise, the same road that carried him
to the Tennessee River lakes will soon
bear the weight of his FLW Tour rig.
“He’s so much better than I ever
was,” says Steve, who spent three years
on the FLW Tour. “I’m tickled to death.
I’m proud to see him doing so well at
such a young age.
“I told him his day will come,” adds
the proud father. “I told him if he gets
that degree, he’ll always be able to get a
job in the fishing industry, whether he’s
on the Tour or somewhere else.”
FLWFISHING.COM I OCTOBER 2017