Morristown,
TN -Entering the final day of the PAA Bass Pro Shops Tournament Series on Tennessee’s Cherokee Lake, Tommy Biffle sat in 6th place, over eight pounds behind Day 2 leader, Bobby Lane. After bringing just seven fish to the scales over the course of the first two days of competition, the veteran Oklahoma pro knew that he was on quality fish, but needed something special to happen on Saturday in order to take home the title.
Things got off to a rocky start for Biffle on the final morning as he promptly lost a three-pounder. “My first two days, I never lost a fish,” he told The BASS ZONE. “When I lost that 3-pounder, I told my camera man that it was a killer because I wasn’t getting enough bites to recover.”
Still
lamenting his missed
opportunity, Biffle managed two
keepers flipping a ditch in the
back of a shallow pocket. “I
thought that there were some
good fish in the very backs of
some of these pockets because
there were shad and baitfish
back there,” he said. “I
started looking at my Lowrance
GPS mapping to find coves that
had little ditches running in
the backs of them. I found one
cove and fished to the back of
it where there was a big willow
tree in the water.”
Biffle eased his Ranger boat
around the corner of the large
willow tree around 10:30 and saw
what he described as, “The
mother lode.”
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“I
nosed the boat around the willow tree
as far as I could float my boat to see
if there was any more water back there
behind it and there were seven or
eight 3- to 4-pounders swimming back
there in a foot of water. It was
pretty exciting because I literally
thought that the boat wouldn’t float
past the tree, that’s how shallow it
was. They weren’t 10 yards from me
and I immediately hit my Power Poles
to anchor me in place.
“I turned to my camera man and told him that I would win the tournament right there,” Biffle continued. After going through a litany of baits, Biffle’s first bite, which turned out to be the Big Bass for the day, came on a topwater Spook. After that, he went back to flipping and spent over an hour changing the color of his Biffle Bug, adding rattles, and varying retrieves.
“I tried all kinds of things with my Biffle Bug – anything and everything I could think of to get a bite. Finally, I let the bait sit by the willow for a long time and it started swimming off and I caught my second one. I realized then that I figured out how to catch them.”
With four keepers in the livewell, Biffle finally decided to look elsewhere for his limit fish and found another shallow ditch in the back of a nearby cove. “I thought that I had a good one on, but it turned out to be a snapping turtle,” he laughed. After re-rigging, Biffle made a long pitch to the back of the ditch in 8-inches of water and caught his limit fish, another 3-pounder.
With 10 minutes of fishing time remaining, Biffle returned to his magic willow tree and lost a good fish, but was unable to increase his total weight. In the end, it was anatomy of the location and Biffle’s unwillingness to leave that paid off with the win.
“The only place that they had to go was under the willow tree.
The ditch was about 40 yards long and really shallow. The deepest part of the ditch was 3-feet at the most,” he explained. “They either had to swim under the boat or swim under the willow. I figured that it would take a while for them to get used to the boat so I messed with them for a long time. I guess I kind of had them trapped back there.
“I’ve seen it like that in the spring before, but I’ve never seen something like that in a tournament in the summer when it was so tough to get a bite.”
With the tournaments heaviest limit weighing 16.78 pounds, Biffle outdistanced second place finisher, Bobby Lane, by just over two-pounds.
Throughout the three days of competition, Biffle relied primarily on the Gene Larew Biffle Bug, a flipping bait of his own design. On the first day of competition, he caught two of his keepers on a Biffle Hard Head dressed with a Biffle Bug. He weighed in one fish on
day two and day three on a Zara Spook, but the rest came while flipping a Biffle Bug.
Looking back on his performance, Biffle said that he knew the potential for a big bag was there, it just had to come down to finding the right areas. “I had pulled up a few 4-pounders in practice and seen a 5-pounder so I knew that I had a chance. I also knew that there was a good chance of someone zeroing on that final day. Anybody was subject to zero when it’s that tough. If you can just get lucky and get a few bites, you can catch up pretty easy.”
Committed to the shallow bite from the start, Biffle also said that a key to his success was targeting shallow water cover in areas where there weren’t many other competitors. After practicing in the river for a day, he decided that the boat traffic and pressure was just too much to handle.
“The reason that I chose to fish at the lower end in the clear water is because I knew that you could catch them down there shallow and other guys won’t fish like that. The final day of practice, all I did was ride around and look. I marked every single bush in the back of every pocket that I went into. That way, I knew what was in the back of each pocket because I had already marked it.”
While he spent an entire practice day marking potential locations, he nearly missed out on finding what would eventually be the winning areas. “When I went looking, I cut across the lake by the dam and missed two or three coves at the very end. Those turned out to be the ones that I caught my fish in on the final day,” he said.
Had he located the areas prior to the final day, Biffle believes that a come-from-behind victory wouldn’t have been needed. “I think that I could have blown it out of the water if I had found these areas before the final day,” he stated. “I’ve fished several lakes like this where you just have to find the right situation. I think if I had just done this during the first two days, I would have run off with it.
Biffle also pointed out that he even considered missing the tournament in order to get ready for the Bassmaster Elite Series Postseason which kicks off in less than two weeks in Alabama. “I had a little trouble with even fishing this tournament simply because I had so much to do in order to get ready for the postseason,” he admitted. “You’re only as good as your last tournament so I wanted to go into the postseason winning the last tournament that I fished there on Ft. Gibson
Lake.
“I’ve always supported the PAA so I talked myself into going. I didn’t really think that I’d do as well as I did. I knew that the lake was deep and clear but I had never seen the lake before.
“I’m fishing good right now. I’m not losing many fish, so I have a lot of confidence.”
For a complete list of final
standings, visit www.fishpaa.com
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