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Gainesville, Fla. – For veteran Florida pro Bernie Schultz, 2008 was a pivotal career year filled with an ongoing series of mini-dramas. After subpar campaigns in 2005, 2006 and 2007 that saw him miss the ensuing Classics, he rebounded this year to earn his eighth Classic bid.
It wasn’t easy.
After an early season hot streak that saw him earn five consecutive checks and surge into the twenties in the Angler of the Year race, a mid-to-late season swoon jeopardized his Classic chances. He dropped to 39th after Kentucky Lake, and a check at the ninth tournament, held on Old Hickory, didn’t advance him even a single place in the standings. Then he missed the cut at Erie and fell to 49th, roughly the middle of the pack. All of that hard work, six checks in ten events, and it was about to be flushed down the drain.
But Schultz salvaged his year at Oneida with a season’s-best 10th place finish and placed himself solidly inside the Classic cut. When the field blasts off on the first day of February’s Red River event, it’ll all seem like a distant memory. More importantly, everyone will be back at zero.
Wheeler Woes
After the sixth tournament of the year, at South Carolina’s Lake Murray, Schultz had clawed his way to 22nd in the AOY race. He barely missed the money at the season-opener at the Harris Chain, and then reeled off five straight money finishes at Kissimmee, Falcon, Amistad, Clarks Hill and Murray. While four of those were in the 30s or 40s, the streak also included a 15th place finish at the Falcon slugfest.
But “then the wheels fell off at the structure lakes,” specifically Wheeler and Kentucky Lake, he said. In those two tournaments he finished 86th and 74th, respectively.
Both of the lakes have given him trouble in the past: “I have a bad track record on Wheeler. The first time I went there, my dad died in the middle of the tournament. That kind of set the tone. I think I’ve only gotten one or two checks there. It’s a good lake, but for some reason it’s got my number.”
This year was no exception to that general rule.
“Wheeler was just extremely frustrating,” he said. “I spent two days (of practice) searching the grass thoroughly and I found two really good areas with really good concentrations of fish. Two of the top twelve finishes came out of them. I was fishing a lipless crankbait over the grass in the Decatur Flats area. It’s a bite I’m very comfortable and proficient with. A lipless crankbait through stranding grass, I grew up with that.”
He ended up fishing around a number of other competitors, and while he had the bite dialed in for numbers, quality fish eluded him.
“I wasn’t catching quality, even in practice,” Schultz said. “Then the first morning I put on a clinic, but every fish was a two pounder. The guys around me weren’t getting nearly as many bites, but I had 10 to 12 pounds and they had 15 to 18.”
Even after close friend Shaw Grigsby loaned him a prototype bait, the same bait that helped Grigsby earn a top twelve finish, Schultz remained “snakebit.”
“I was dialed in, catching more fish than anyone around me, but I couldn’t catch those quality fish,” he remembered.
Kentucky Troubles
Schultz has had numerous opportunities in his nearly two decades as a touring pro to fish Kentucky and Barkley lakes, but he admitted that his history there has not always been stellar.
“I do good there any time before the summer,” he said. “I can find them on the ledges but for some reason I can never make it work. So I guess I had a bad attitude going in.”
In 2007, he missed the money because he committed to pursuing a shallow bite. Having learned from that experience, he committed to fishing the drops and ledges in 2008. The two massive lakes have miles and miles of prime-looking structure, but the key areas nevertheless tend to draw a crowd, and Schultz was victimized by that tendency this year.
“I found several sweet spots on key ledges,” he said. “But I had a bad draw. On my best place, when I got there, there were two boats already on it. They were both high finishers, too. It seemed every other place had a boat on it as well. Community holes, that’s no way to fish.”
The strong ledge bite at Kentucky Lake bit Schultz again at the subsequent event held at Old Hickory.
“I like Old Hickory, I’m comfortable there,” he said. “But based on Kentucky Lake, and a little at Wheeler, and how the fish were relating to the river channel drops, I abandoned what I normally do there, which is to fish shallow in the backs of the creeks. That was a huge mistake.”
He dedicated two days of practice to fishing drops and missed out on the shallow bite that
benefited anglers like eventual winner Kevin Wirth. Schultz still managed to squeak into the money, “but I cost myself a lot of points,” he said.
More disappointing than the missed opportunity on Old Hickory was the fact that Old Hickory was on the schedule at all. Originally, the Elite Series pros were to have been in Burlington, Iowa that week, fishing the Mississippi River, but flooding on the Mississippi required BASS to move the tournament.
“The one tournament I had good help for was Iowa,” Schultz said. “I did my homework, well ahead of the cutoff, and my game plan was set. But the downward spiral kept going.”
He finished 45th at Old Hickory but he didn’t budge from 39th in the AOY race, just a few spots outside the Classic cut, on the outside looking in.
New York Swing
At Erie, where he needed to do well to remain in the Classic hunt, Schultz made a mistake similar to the one he’d made at Kentucky Lake in 2007 – he committed to the shallow bite. It wasn’t entirely unreasonable. After all, he’d gotten a check at Erie in 2007 fishing shallow, but this year there were fewer fish there.
He made a conscious decision to preserve his equipment and his physical well-being from Erie’s wrath, but paid heavily in a different way – with a 67th place finish that dropped him to 49th in the AOY race.
Fortunately, the last event of the year was on Oneida, which played directly into one of his strengths – shallow grass.
“The smallmouth on Oneida often act like largemouth,” he said. “You can catch them in grass or around muddy bottoms in the backs of bays.”
Unlike 2006, when the fish were bunched in massive schools chasing perch fry, this year Schultz had to constantly adapt over the course of the four tournament days. He caught fish from 2 to 17 feet deep, on a variety of different lures, including Texas-rigged Senkos, jigs, topwaters and a dropshot rig. But his key presentation was a Rapala X-Rap Shad, a jerkbait that he fished like a crankbait. Schultz knew that he had something special going when he outfished Kevin VanDam in the same area – one of the sport’s most difficult feats.
Schultz worried about his Classic position throughout the event, but couldn’t rest until he’d made the cut to the final day. “I was told each day that I was teetering,” he said. “Nobody would tell me whether I was in or out of the Classic cut.”
He never managed to catch one of the 17 to 20 pound bags that propelled the top few anglers to their finishes, but he was remarkably consistent at Oneida, sacking between 12 and 15-plus pounds a day en route to his 10th place finish, which in turn provided more than enough points to make it to his eighth Classic.
Classic Bound
Now that Schultz is headed to the big show, some of his swagger is back.
“I feel that I can compete with any 25 year old,” he said. “I don’t feel they have any physical advantage over me. Mentally, I’m better than I used to be. I may just be making wiser choices.”
But at the same time, he recognizes that while he’s still passionate, the Classic is not necessarily the ultimate goal that it once was. “It is important, but the truth is that there are things that are more important,” he said. “The reality is that I have two sons, they’re teenagers, and I have to be (home) for them.” Whereas he could once be on the road for weeks or months at a time pre-fishing, he now wants to spend more time with his family. Furthermore, in between events he can often be found working for his sponsors, one of the benefits of his successful years on tour, but also an additional demand upon his time. |
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The long gap between Oneida and Shreveport has left Schultz with a lot of time to anticipate his eighth Bassmaster Classic. Like most of the competitors, he intends to spend as much time as possible pre-fishing, learning the subtleties of the various pools in preparation for the event, but he won’t head down there to practice until the flooded waters of the Red River recede. He hopes that happens before the December cut-off date. After a 2008 season that featured an equal mix of highs and lows, he hopes to start off 2009 with the ultimate high, a win in fishing’s biggest event.
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