duckweed
When Cox returned to Cotaco the
first day of the tournament, he got a lit-
tle surprise in his preferred stretch.
“There was duckweed everywhere,”
he says. “I have no idea where it came
from. I guess it washed down from
above. There had been some duckweed
in the little feeders and sloughs off the
main creek, so maybe it all floated out
when the water came up. A lot of it had
piled up against the laydowns where I
wanted to fish.
“All I knew is that duckweed means
frog fishing, so I tied on a floating frog,”
he continues. “It was game on. When I
skipped that frog up under a tree to a
mat of duckweed, a good one would
blast it. It was crazy.”
Cox took an early lead on day one
with 16 pounds, 11 ounces, and from that
point on, the rest was history. Cox would
go on to pull another 15 pounds, 10
ounces from Cotaco on day two to build
a lead of 6 pounds, 7 ounces at halftime.
Though he tried a couple of other
backwater areas on days three and four,
he always returned to Cotaco to keep
his competitors at bay, winning the
event wire-to-wire with final limits of
11 pounds and 11-8.
He says the area changed each day
due to fluctuating water levels, his fish-
ing pressure and the duckweed sliding
around, but the changes really didn’t
require much in the way of a tactical
change. He just kept walking the frog at
a very slow speed past visible cover
and under shady trees, plus anywhere
the duckweed mats were thick.
“Getting up there to find that area in
practice was the key to the whole thing,”
Cox says. “I really didn’t know if it would
hold up for four days, but it did.”
definitely tell it was cool. And there
was bait everywhere. The place just
looked and felt awesome.”
Once Cox started sampling the creek
with a rod and reel in practice, it didn’t
take him long to determine what lived
there.
“I caught a good one on a spinner-
bait, rolled the hook over and had a
couple more good bites,” Cox says.
“Then my brother, who was practicing
with me, caught a couple of nice ones.
As we were leaving the creek, he said,
‘This is Money Creek, baby!’
“I thought he was serious,” Cox
laughs. “I said, ‘Is this really called Money
Creek?’ I had no idea where we were.”
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fLwfIshINg.coM I octoBer-NoveMBer 2016