Le Second, Davis Third

Story by Brent Conway

The second event on the Wal-Mart FLW Tour series got underway in Tennessee today. 200 FLW pros paired with co-anglers from across the globe took off out of Tellico Landing. The competitors will focus their efforts this week on Tellico and Fort Loudon lakes. 

Located just southwest of Knoxville, Fort Loudon and Tellico comprise more 30,000 acres of fishable water. Connected by a canal, anglers will have the opportunity to search both bodies of water for the winning weight and $125,000.00. All competitors will fish for two days and then a cut will be made to just the top ten. Once the field is set and the weights zeroed, the pros will fish for the largest weight over the final two days. The co-angler champion will be the competitor who brings in the heaviest bag on Saturday.

This part of Tennessee houses several FLW pros including David Walker, Wesley Strader, Andy Morgan and Ott Defoe—who used a flaot-&-fly rig to finish 6th at the first event on Lake Travis in Texas.

Pre-tournament predications called for a tough week of fishing in Tennessee. The low water conditions and radical temperature fluctuations left the fish tight lipped and the fishermen scratching their heads. The continued warm weather had many thinking of bedding bass and sight-fishing. 

Day one dawned in typical spring time fashion with temperatures in the mid 50’s and a slight chance of rain. Practice reports told of both spawning and pre-spawn bass being seen and the weigh-in stage gave proof that the fishing was anything but tough.

Setting the benchmark was BF Goodrich pro, Chad Grisby. His five fish limit came in at 19-06. Several anglers followed with respectable weights, but it wasn’t until Than Le, of Las Vegas, NM, crossed the stage that the leader was threatened. Le realigned the standings with his first day’s weight of 18-10. The action continued until all 200 pros and their back-seaters had passed the scales. 

Right behind second place Le in third was Oklahoma pro Harmon Davis. His day one weight of 18-05 left him just over a pound off the pace. In fourth on Thursday was John Sappington, who brought 17-13 to the scales. 

Rounding out the top five was Florida pro Frank Meyer, weighing a limit of 17-04.Weights were tight up and down the leader-board with each place from second down being apart only by ounces. It’s clear that Friday will be moving day as one key fish will mean all the difference. 

When the first day was complete, the Top ten looked like this:

6 CHRIS BAUMGARDNER 5 17-02
7 DEREK JONES 5 17-00
8 JAY YELAS 5 16-06
9 MARK DAVIS 5 16-05
10 SAM NEWBY 5 16-03

Grigsby Up Shallow
“I like it when they are shallow,” said Grigsby, who has seven top-10 finishes and has amassed $282,465 in career earnings with FLW Outdoors. “I haven’t caught a smallmouth all week until today. There are a lot of fish in the area I am fishing and I don’t think I hurt them to bad today. 

“I had my limit by 10:30 this morning and then I just went looking for new stuff following the same pattern I am on now,” he added. “I’m looking for certain banks with similar structure. Once I find that, I back off the bank and slow way down and just fish where I think they should be.”

Grigsby was pitching banks with Berkley soft-plastics in bedding areas targeting the bass that are beginning to spawn, and tomorrow it’s more of the same. “My plan for tomorrow is to just go back out,” he said. “I’ll get a limit and look for new water.” 

Le Blind-Casting to Beds
Le is on the bank looking at almost everything he’s catching. One of his bigger fish, however, came from a bed he wasn’t targeting. “I’m sight-fishing and I just happened to get two bigger females to bite,” Le said. “One I caught blind-casting – I knew where the bed was and I made a long cast to it and she bit. 

“The other big female I had to work for about 45 minutes before getting her to bite. The rest of my limit was bucks.”

Spending almost an hour on a fish creates openings for other competitors inside Le’s crowded area to move in. As a result, he’s being methodical in protecting his best water. “There are a lot of boats in the area,” he added. “Probably about 15 boats, but I’m just being real patient and letting boats fish through the area before going back behind them to see if they missed anything.”

Davis Beating the Banks
Oklahoma pro Harmon Davis knows that an angler can go long periods of in between days where everything falls into place, and Thursday was just such a day where he could do no wrong. “I just had one of those awesome fishing days where everything goes right on the water,” Davis said. “It’s been a long time since I had a day like that so it feels pretty good.”

Working beds, Harmon is working a finesse bait while moving from one to the next. “While I was looking along the bank, I was pitching a Berkley hand-poured finesse worm out in front of the boat and that’s how I caught the two big ones,” he said. “I never saw them before they bit, but I know they were set up outside the beds waiting to pair up with the males.

Davis knows that he will have to have another magical day Friday in order to stay in contention. “I’ve got some males I can catch tomorrow,” he explained, “but I’m going to have to happen upon big ones like that again to have another catch like that.”
” 

The TOP 20 After Day 1