Bailey Fain and I recently competed for the College Bassmaster Classic on Watts Bar Lake, this event was held in conjunction with the Bassmaster Classic.
We had a limited amount of practice time for the tournament, but with that small amount of time we were able to develop two main patterns.
The first pattern was throwing a lipless crankbait and a vibrating jig in the very back of creeks where there was warmer water and bait. The other was fishing a medium diving crankbait on transition banks, targeting fish that had not moved up yet.
The morning of the tournament we were faced with harsh conditions as a cold front, blue bird skies, and no wind was in the forecast for the day. We started off throwing a lipless crankbait, but quickly realized that would not be the deal. The cold front pushed the fish a little bit further out of the creeks which set up nicely for our transition bank pattern we were on.
After our first spot we got on a hot streak, limited out and culled a few times in the next couple hours. Our limit weighed just shy of 14 pounds, but we were glad to have it!
I used a Rapala DT6 in the Demon color and fished it on my Kahuna 7’10” Custom S-Glass rod cranking while Bailey threw a 1.5 Square bill to target shallower water. After having a quick limit we spent the rest of the day targeting isolated humps and stumps with an Alabama-rig to try and get a big bite, but it never happened.
We figured we wouldn’t have enough weight to win, but due to the tough conditions we were the only team to bring in a limit!
After putting our boats on the trailer we drove to the Thompson Bowling Arena and got to weigh in on the biggest stage in bass fishing. It was was an amazing experience and one I will never forget.
