Practice
Three previous Cups at Lake
Ouachita have shown there are three
principal ways to catch bass in
August: burning the bank with top-
waters, focusing on schooling fish or
fishing deep brush piles. Brad
Knight’s 2015 winning pattern of fish-
ing drop-shots around shallow lay-
downs is an outlier.
For Davis, choosing one of those
three was a no-brainer.
“I’m a decent offshore fisherman,
but I think I’m a really good brush
pile fisherman,” Davis says. “So that
was the only thing I was going to do
from day one.”
That’s mostly true. Davis admits
he did spend a little time up shallow
one of the practice days, but a few
hours of fruitless fishing pushed that
idea out of his head.
He also went into the practice
round with more than 500 brush
piles marked on his graph – leftovers
from the 2015 Cup at Ouachita
where he finished 32nd. Those spots
were no guarantee though. Davis
says the key to any brush pile is that
it’s “fresh.”
“A newly sunken brush pile is
always the best,” he says. “The bait just
likes it better, which pulls in the bass.
“Even in an area with a lot of old
brush piles, you sink a new one down
there and it will get good again.”
Finding brush piles was no prob-
lem during practice. Davis says he’d
marked 1,038 by the time the tour-
nament rolled around, with most in
22 to 30 feet of water. Many of them,
including one of his best, were in
obvious places, but Davis always
likes looking for “sneaky” brush piles
placed in nondescript places, such as
small turns or subtle drains. Those
overlooked piles would prove to be
key during the Cup.
While nearly all the brush piles he
found held fish, it was only the brush
in the southwest corner of the lake
heading toward Mountain Harbor
Marina where he seemed to be able
to get bit.
“I had a thousand places that all
looked alike, but I just couldn’t get bit
anywhere other than there,” Davis
says. “It’s not like I was getting a lot
of bites anyway, but that’s where I
decided to focus.”
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