11 JiMMyREESE
12 ScottMARTIN by Curtis Niedermier
Photo by rob nEWELL
11 JiMMyREESE
32LbS, 7oZ by Tyler Brinks
Tactics
Reese located a series of main-lake clay points where schooling bass were feeding on shad. Catching them proved to be a challenge, as each day required a different approach due to pressure being applied by other competitors.
Fishing the points was his primary strategy, with the exception of the end of day one, when he moved closer to the launch ramp and found fish busting shad in open water near two long, flat points. Unfortunately, Reese couldn’ t repeat his success in the secondary area.
“ In the last 20 minutes of the first day I was able to cull three times. I went back first thing on the second day and didn’ t get a bite in two hours,” Reese recalls.
Baits
The biggest key for Reese was adjusting his bait selection for the day and continually trying new things to generate bites from the schooling fish. He weighed in fish caught on six lures: a shadcolored Yamamoto D-Shad soft plastic jerkbait, a margarita mutilator Roboworm Straight Tail Worm on a darter head jig, a white Bobby D’ s vibrating jig, a natural shad Keitech Swing Impact Fat swimbait, a chrome-blue popper and a homemade hair jig.
The homemade hair jig featured a darter-style head with white and green hair to imitate small shad. He relied on the jig on the final day to slow down and catch the schooling fish that had grown wary due to the fishing pressure.
12 ScottMARTIN by Curtis Niedermier
32LbS, 3oZ
Tactics
Martin exclusively targeted schooling fish on main-lake clay points near Wheeler Dam and believes he was around the quality of fish to win, but he had to share them with other top finishers.
“ My fault was I couldn’ t rotate much. I was locked in, so I had to rotate baits,” he says.
The schoolers busted at the surface mostly on the riverchannel side of the points in about 15 feet of water, but occasionally they ran bait up into as shallow as 2 feet. Martin used a couple of other tricks to fire up his schools, including cranking his HydroWave up to an ultra-high frequency and casting from the bank out toward deep water. By the final day, he wasn’ t casting unless he saw a fish break the surface.
Baits
On day one, Martin was able to catch his fish by mixing it up with what he calls“ normal” baits: M-Pack Jig, Fish Head Spin, LIVETARGET walking topwater bait and Tightlines UV Hawg.
“ On day 2, I realized those fish are very, very smart,” he says.“ As soon as you showed them the same lure the next day, it turned them off. I couldn’ t get them to commit. I had to find something totally different that they hadn’ t seen.”
He spent the next two days trying to mimic 1- to 1 1 / 4-inch shad by firing crappie lures, tiny Fish Head Spins, micro-swimbaits and even a small two-hook jerkbait that he“ Frankensteined” into a mini wake bait by melting down the lip.
Photo by garrick dixon
OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2016 I FLWFISHING. COM 75