Commanding the Cup
46
On day one of the Cup, Atkins took
command of the event with a stunning
21-pound, 5-ounce catch to grab the
early lead over hometown favorite and
former Cup winner Anthony Gagliardi.
Atkins’ Cup tactic was fishing big,
noisy pencil poppers over the top of sub-
merged “cane piles.” A cane pile is a
type of man-made fish habitat com-
prised of bamboo stalks clumped
together and cemented into a bucket,
then placed upright in the lake. The idea
is to get the cane piles to stand up verti-
cally in the water column to simulate
standing timber, giving bass an ambush
point to lurk around while waiting on
unsuspecting shad and blueback herring
to cruise by near the surface.
The cane piles are often placed in 20
to 30 feet of water throughout the main
lake on the breaks of humps and points,
which are known travel routes for
nomadic herring. Bamboo that stands up
10 to 20 feet off the bottom and is about 5
to 10 feet shy of the surface is ideal.
Dialing in on Cane
Cane piles are prolific in Lake
Murray. The problem, however, is that
despite their numbers, cane piles are
hard to find.
“The cane is thin and gets water-
logged, which makes it hard to detect on
side-imaging sonar,” Atkins explains.
“They do show up with traditional 2-D
sonar, but happening across one right
under the boat is like finding a needle in
a haystack.”
Atkins would know. He spent two
and a half days of pre-practice looking for
cane piles before he found the first one.
“I discovered the first one with 2-D
sonar and marked it,” Atkins recalls.
“Then I came back to it the next day
and idled back and forth by it about a
dozen times while I dialed in my side-
imaging until I could see it clearly.”
Atkins says adjustments to sensitiv-
ity, contrast and chart speed were need-
ed to juice up his signal and clearly
define a cane pile on side-imaging. The
chart speed was particularly important.
When the return scrolled by at a faster
speed on the screen, it enlarged the
image of the cane pile and the cane’s
sonar “shadow” out to the side.
“Once I got the side-imaging dialed
in where I could see cane piles out both
sides of my boat at 100 feet, it was on,”
Atkins says. “I spent the next six days
side-imagining for cane.”
In all, he located nearly 80 piles,
with about 25 of them winding up as
key targets.
“The fresher, bushier piles were better,
without a doubt,” Atkins says. “I could
see more fish returns around them when
compared to the older, thinner ones.”
FLWFISHING.COM I OCTOBER 2017