Posted  April 12th, 2008  9:11pm CST

Rookie Reehm In Second, McClelland Chasing Forth Elite Title

Story by Brent Conway - Photos by Mark Jeffreys

Del Rio, TX – The fourth stop of the 2008 Elite Series, on Lake Amistad along the Texican border, faltered coming out of the gates. Due to a forecast calling for wind advisories, tournament director Trip Weldon canceled Thursday’s opening round. As a result, Friday, customarily the day of the 50-man cut, was the official beginning point of this week’s Battle on the Border.

The delayed start left a full field of 109 anglers to fish until Saturday, where they were culled down to the top 12 left to fish Sunday. Friday had everyone in the Top 12 with better than 25 pounds setting the pace for winner exceeding the century mark, had it gone four days. While the 100-pound barrier won’t be crossed, it’s well within reason to assume that a new unofficial three-day record will be set.

This is ironic considering that pre-tournament reports had most every angler in the field pour mouthing a darling in the world of bass fishing by saying that fish were in abundance but size was slight. However, Friday’s weigh-in proved that these guys, like all fishermen, are prone to exaggeration.

With a shortened workweek, the strategy of saving fish, shallow versus deep, and hole squatting shifted as pros were forced to stray away from playing the averages and instead had to swing for the fence straight away.

With a 15-mile-per-hour breeze blowing off and on from the north throughout the day as a front passed through forced a change in the game. As is always the case somebody figured it out, resulting in changes throughout the ranks on the leader board. 

Sophomore pro Jason Williamson made the most of it by coming in with 29-13 to claim the lead Saturday with a total weight of 55-12. Elite Series rookie Clark Reehm took the second-place slot by weighing 25-12, giving him a two-day combined weight of 54-10.

Knotted up in the third place slot was Mike McClelland, with 23-14 on the day, and the man in pink Kevin Short, with 31-6, who had 53-3 overall. Edwin Evers held down the fifth-place slot with a combined weight of 50-2, which was given help by his second-day weight of 23-14.

Rounding out the Super Six was Elite Series rookie Billy Brewer, with a two-day total of 49-13, after bringing 24-1 to the scales Saturday.

Williamson Hoping for Wind
In two years of Elite Series competition, Jason Williamson has learned that when in Rome, do as the Romans do. “I put all of my little bait away and pulled out the big swimbaits today,” he said. 

Williamson, armed with the swimbait, has been able to establish a strong pattern within a pattern that he’s able to run all over the lake. “I’ve got a few areas that I can count on,” he explained, “but really what I’m running I can do all over the lake – it’s just a real specific deal.”

Fishing deep contour at Amistad is, as everyone knows, pretty basic. The secondary pattern Williamson has discovered is basically separated by 10 yards – from the tree to the break, that is. “You’ve got to have deep water right by the trees,” Jason explained. 

“You need to have about 50 feet of water just beside it – that’s the key to the whole deal. About 11:00 to 11:30, it’s on like Donkey Kong.”

Wind has been a constant companion all week, but Sunday it promising to slack. Williamson is hoping that it doesn’t die off completely. “If I have just a little bit of wind, and just a little bit of cloud cover, I might be able to have an even bigger bag,” he said. 

“If it gets slick and calm, it’ll hurt, but I’ve got some good areas so I’m excited about tomorrow.”

Reehm Is On the Spot
Elite Series rookie Clark Reehm has been in the thick of it all week, but like many in the field Saturday noted that the bite was off…until the afternoon. “Today was good, but the bites were slower during the morning,” he said. “It seemed like they bit better in the afternoon, and they were bigger too.”

The question is why? “I don’t know if it was the northeast wind that we had or what,” Clark explained. “It might have shut them down a little bit or something, but I went through a lot of short-strikes this morning. It seemed like they were just grabbing the tail or something.”

After telling his co-angler around 2:00 that he was going to save his fish, Reehm left in search of new water. “I was extremely happy with what I’d caught at that point,” he said. “I started hitting some main lake points and found a new spot that I was able to cull two fours with.”

Regardless of what the wind does, or doesn’t do, Reehm has options. Whether he chooses to leverage them or not will be a game-time decision. “I’ve got some water in Mexico that I haven’t seen since practice, but I know it’s got some good fish,” he said.

“The problem is that it will cut two hours out of my day. I might rot on this spot, I don’t know.”

McClelland is Ready for Rest
After the pig fest at Falcon, Mike McClelland was really looking to get another check at Amistad and head to the barn. Instead, he himself tied in third place heading to Sunday’s final round with a legitimate shot at winning. “I’m just wore out,” the three-time Elite Series winner expressed. “But the Lord had really blessed me this week.” 

McClelland didn’t have a clue that the area he’d found in practice held the kind of fish it did. Friday, Mike expressed concerns that he may have battered his fish to the point that he’d burned his best spot. Turns out, he was wrong. “The spot that I started on did replenish, which I was worried about last night,” he said. 

“I caught my first four fish of the day off of it before it sort of died down a little bit.”

Rather than move on, McClellend put down his Zoom Brush Hog he’d been throwing on a Carolina rig and picked up a prototype stickbait from Spro. “I caught my first four off a Carolina Rig,” Mike explained. 

“I picked up the Spro prototype and started catching them again and was able to finish out my limit and cull a couple of times.” 

Staying in 24 to 28 feet of water, McClelland is working the rig/stickbait combo painfully slow. “The way that I’m fishing I’m just staying on the contour and just methodically fishing,” he said. “You don’t get a lot of bites doing that, but generally when you do it’s a pretty good one.”

It’s been a week, in a run of long weeks for McClelland. Be that as it may, he’s ready to go one more day. “Without the day off I would be totally smoked,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to tomorrow now that I’ve made it this far though.”

K-Short and Boiled Neckbones
Kevin Short, though he is the pink warrior, can carry grudge with the best of them. After whacking 33 pounds out of the gate in ’07, he blanked the next day. Upset…vengeful? Nah, just getting even. “I was just beating on them for treating me bad last year, that’s all it was,” Short jokingly said. 

“It was a good day to be fishing a jig, what can I say?”

Short, never “short” of metaphors, explained that he never put the Jewell jig down all day and that he wasn’t doing anything spectacular, but admits that it’s something he should’ve been doing all along. “I just got old school on them, that’s all,” he said. 

Evers Rock Solid
You might call Edwin Evers the Cool Hand Luke of professional bass fishing, as, despite a lighter bag than yesterday, he wasn’t at all rattled. “I didn’t catch a bunch today, like I did yesterday,” the Oklahoma pro commented. 

“I only had three good ones and two little ones that I couldn’t get rid of.”

Evers explained that while the cold front that passed overhead didn’t cause a change that could be diagnosed, he was able to pick up on a subtle difference. “I caught about what I caught yesterday, but had to work quit a bit harder for them,” he said. “The wind today sort of had them a little off, but I’m not really sure how you would classify it.”

Going into Sunday’s final round in fifth place is never a bad thing – particularly when you’ve been able to further refine what you’re doing. “I figured out a few things today that will help,” he said. “Tomorrow should be interesting.”

Along with a tweak to his program, Edwin noted that he’s had quite a few boats around him throughout the tournament, but should have his primary water mostly to himself Sunday (save one Billy Brewer). That said, it’s sweet dreams and a hope that the weather holds another day.

“I’m not going to make any changes overnight,” Edwin said. “About the only thing I need is to figure out what the weather and the wind will be doing.”

Brewer, who’s sharing water with Evers, is taking it one day, and one bite, at a time. His only hope is that his repair work holds. “I’ve only got one bait and when it’s done I will be too,” he said. “I’m going to have to go in and put some superglue on it and try and patch it up and hope that it holds together.

BZ on XM Satellite Radio Goes On Location The Week

Starting this upcoming Sunday, April 13, 2008, The BASS ZONE will once again break new ground through a call-in radio show broadcast from on location at the site of the Bassmaster Elite Series, Battle on the Border in Del Rio, Texas. The show will be broadcast LIVE from 6am until 7am eastern time on XM Sports Nation, Channel 144, then again at 8:00am until 9:00am

"This is pretty cool stuff we are doing with XM Satellite Radio," said BZ's Mark Jeffreys. "We were the first independent news resource to provide interactive coverage of the BASS events through our live chats from the water, and now we'll take it one step further with the call-in portion of our XM show. We want the BZ viewers to call in and talk about our insane Texas tour of Falcon Lake and Lake Amistad"

BZ Staff Writer Pete Robbins will join Mark and the Legend, Harold Allen, from the XM studios in Washington, DC this weekend, and on several other Sundays over the course of the Elite Series season. 

Be sure to tune in to XM Channel 144 this Sunday and call in with your questions or comments at 866.XMSN-144 (866.967.6144). For those of you who will be on the water without access to their XM receivers, the shows will be recorded and rebroadcast on The BASS ZONE April 14th

It really is all about being there…..and now you too can be there with Mark and the Legend.

DAY TWO STANDINGS