WHAT WENT WRONG? LEWISVILLE AND OKEECHOBEE

Story by Matt Pangrac - Photos by Mark Jeffreys, Matt Pangrac, and Dave Rush

Moore, OK - Following each Bassmaster Elite Series, Bassmaster Open, and FLW Tour Open tournament during the 2012 season, The BASS ZONE will interview two anglers who finished in the bottom half of the field to find out “what went wrong?”

It’s easy to get the winning details from an angler who just lifted a trophy – It’s tougher to go one-on-one with an angler who just missed the cut by 20-pounds, failed to catch a limit the entire tournament, and dropped 10 places in the Angler Of the Year standings. 

The bass fishing media tends to avoid analyzing poor tournament performances. For some reason, when a pro angler finishes in 100th place, nobody stops to ask him, “What went wrong?” In other professional sports, sub-par performances by individual players become a major part of the storyline.  

In the first installment of this series, The BASS ZONE caught up with Casey Ashley and Ish Monroe following disappointing performances in the first Bassmaster Southern Open of the season on Florida’s Harris Chain.  To read the story, CLICK HERE.

This week, the focus shifts to the first Bassmaster Central Open of the 2012 season on Texas’ Lake Lewisville and the first FLW Tour Open of the year on Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. 

Although both tournaments were held at the same time, the fishing conditions and results were drastically different.  With muddy, cold water at the Lewisville Open, Brent Chapman won the tournament in a fish-off with a three-day total weight of 20-9.   In order to crack the Top 10, it required less than 11-pounds over three competition days.

Out of the 178 anglers entered in the Lewisville Open, 62 anglers failed to catch a keeper during the first two days of competition, and just three limits were weighed-in throughout the entire event.  On the final day of competition, the 12 remaining anglers combined to bring just seven keeper bass to the scales. 

Elite Series pro, Clark Reehm, was one of the competitors who failed to catch a single keeper during the tournament, finishing in a tie for 117th place.  With five Top 10 finishes in Bassmaster Central Open competition dating back to 2007, Reehm has twice qualified for the Bassmaster Classic through the Central Opens.  In last year’s Lewisville Central Open, Reehm cashed a check and finished in 37th place. 

It was a different story in the FLW Tour Open on Lake Okeechobee.  Randall Tharp ran away with the victory, breaking the century mark and amassing a total weight of 101-12.  While a lingering weather system hampered many of the angers who planned on sight fishing, it still took over 50-pounds just to crack the Top 10.

Out of 160 competitors, Texas pro Kelly Jordon finished in 149th place with a total weight of 10-10.  On Day One, Jordon crossed the scales with a five bass limit weighing 10-10 and then zeroed on Day Two. 

The results were surprising, considering that Jordon, who is a strong sight fisherman, won an FLW Tour event on Okeechobee in 2005 and finished 4th on Okeechobee during the 2006 FLW Tour tournament. 

Here’s how Reehm and Jordon explained “what went wrong” at Lake Lewisville and Lake Okeechobee:

Clark Reehm – Bassmaster Central Open – Lake Lewisville: T117th Place (0-0)

Tournament Practice:
“Last year’s Open was the first time that I’d ever fished Lewisville.  The fishing was terrible, and I caught two fish each day and scratched out a small check.  I knew that it would be another low weight tournament this year, and after talking with guys who had been on the lake, I knew that it would be awful.

“The one thing about the bass in Lewisville is that they have size. The lake has the quality, but if you’re not getting bites it doesn’t really matter.

“I got to Lewisville on Friday night, and knowing how tough it would be, I didn’t even go out on the water for the first two days.  The wind blew over 20-miles-per-hour and it was freezing cold. Traditionally, that lake fishes as a junk fishing lake.  I knew that, so there was no sense in beating up any fish.

“When I did get out on the water that Monday, I started doing a lot of graphing.  I looked for places that I could potentially fish during the tournament.  It is common knowledge that the lake used to be maintained at a lower level and there’s a lot of stuff in the water in the 5-foot to 10-foot range.

“On Bing maps, if you zoom in close enough, you can see what the lake looked like when it was at a lower level.  I’d mark areas, planning on coming back in the tournament to fish them on tournament day.  There are only a few known areas where fish live on Lewisville, so the way that you actually have to fish that lake is to run isolated cover.  I fished some, but there was no rhyme or reason to why you’d get a bite.”

Tournament Strategy and Game Plan:
“My experience from fishing at the next level is that when it’s tough, you can either creep around or you can speed up and go.  Historically, the guys who speed up and go are the guys who win. 

“My game plan heading into the tournament was to cover as much water as possible and hit as many high percentage areas as I could.  I planned on throwing a little crankbait, spinnerbait, chatterbait, and shakey head.”

Results:
“I went two full tournament days without a single bite. No keepers, no small fish, nothing.  I ran a lot of that isolated stuff that I’d found twice during a day.  I actually spent 45-minutes on the second day of the tournament idling around looking for a group of fish that I’d found on my graph during practice on a big flat. 

“What had happened was that two weeks prior to the tournament, they had torrential rains and the lake came up about six-feet and muddied a lot of the water.  From Wednesday to Thursday, the water temperature dropped over four-degrees.  Essentially, I just didn’t get lucky.  My hat’s off to the guys who did catch them, but this was the biggest ‘luck’ tournament that I have ever fished.  What Champan did wasn’t luck though. It took skill to be able to hunker down and fish the way he did.” 

What Went Wrong?
“I just didn’t get a bite.  I fished my style of fishing.  I like to fish fast and run isolated cover because that’s how you have success on those lakes in that region of the United States.  There is a lot of dead water and they only live in certain areas of these lakes.

“Would I do something different?  Probably not.  I hit as many places as I could and I just didn’t get a bite.  When two guys make the Top 12 and only put two fish in the boat, it’s just a matter of getting a bite.  I just wasn’t able to trigger one.” 

Lessons Learned:
“I learned absolutely nothing that I can take away from the Lewisville Open.  If I had it to do over again, I’d pull up all the waypoints that I marked on isolated cover during practice and I’d go back and bang a crankbait, spinnerbait, wacky-rigged worm, and shakey head around. 

“Realistically, there was nobody who really had them figured out.  Should I have gone up to the hot water discharge where Chapman won?  Well, there were a whole bunch of guys fishing up there who didn’t get bit.  The guys who caught them on the dam throwing umbrella rigs caught them one day and then couldn’t catch them again.  There were also 60 other guys throwing the same rig along the dam and they didn’t catch them. 

“I guess I should have either seen Lewisville on the schedule again and decided not to fish knowing that it was going to suck, or I should have polished up my horseshoe a little bit more or eaten a bowl of Wheaties.”

Kelly Jordon – FLW Tour Open – Lake Okeechobee: 149th Place (10-10)

Tournament Practice:
“There was a full moon on the last day of practice, the water temperature was in the low 70s, and the fish were supposed to spawning in Florida in February.  It was cloudy and rainy the entire practice and I looked everywhere. 

“I looked tirelessly for spawning bass because I figured that they had to be pulling up somewhere on the lake.  I just never found them.  I pretty much covered the entire lake.  I checked out the hydrilla holes and eel grass looking for the big females to move in, because that’s where they killed them last year.  I was really looking forward to it, and that’s how I approached my practice.

“During practice, I had some bites in two of my favorite areas of the lake but I never really slowed down to flip them.  There were so few grass mats, and all of them were concentrated in a few areas so there wasn’t that much cover.  I knew that the lake was going to fish a lot smaller than normal.

Tournament Strategy and Game Plan:
“My plan was to go catch them in one area and then run over to the grass mats and fish for a few big bites each day.  When you’re punching mats, you’re looking for five or six bites.  I thought that I could get ahead of the game by getting a good stringer in the boat early in the morning and then adding a few big fish later on in the day. 

“I was just going to run all my good stuff, and I was pretty confident that I had an area where I could catch 18-pounds in an hour or two.  My plan was to do that and then run over to the Monkey Box and north shore area and flip mats for the rest of the day.”

Results:
“On the first day, I thought that I’d be able to run around the south end of the lake and from the eastern shoreline run all the way up.  When I came out of an area in the southeast corner of the lake, I hit a straight north wind and I had about 25-miles of getting my butt absolutely compacted.  It was no fun at all. 

“When I got there, the wind turned from the due north to almost the east and started blowing straight in to where I was heading.  I didn’t want to run across the lake again and get pounded, so I just put my head down and kept fishing.  I had the bites to have a solid day but I lost several big fish and ended up catching a small limit.

“On the second day, I went back over to the northeast side of the lake and it didn’t work out well at all.  I had a small limit for between eight- and 10-pounds and I decided to push it and fish an extra five minutes to try and catch a kicker and cash a check.

“I thought that I could just shoot across the lake to save some time, but I was fishing out of my brand new boat and I only brought my Navionics chip for the east with me and assumed that Okeechobee would be on that chip. It turns out that Okeechobee is on Navionics southern chip.  

“I was running across the lake and I started seeing Kissimmee grass lines right out in the middle. I was in 5-feet of water in the middle of the lake and I knew there were shoals and rock piles out there.  I wasn’t going to tear my boat up, so I backtracked all the way to my previous trail.  By the time I made it back, I was something like 20-minutes late.” 

What Went Wrong?
“I made a really bone-headed move.  In Florida, you just can’t escape the crowd.  I know that, and I still tried to avoid the crowds.  I decided to fish an area on the northeast side of the lake and an area on the west side of the lake.  My miscalculation came when I thought that the wind was out of the northeast the first day.

“I just outsmarted myself.  I knew where everyone was catching them, but because I never made it in there the first day, I decided that I had no right to go there on Day Two because it’s a pretty small area and there’s really not that much cover.

Lessons Learned:
“Basically, several of the top guys were in the same area that’s pretty popular.  Before I got down to Florida, I know that area is where good fish were going to be caught.  I’ve actually won an FLW tournament right there in the same area where the tournament was won. 

“I know better, but I fell into the trap of trying to get away from the crowds.  I was hard-headed and thought that maybe I’d catch some somewhere else.  Flipping mats is my favorite way to catch them, and I hardly even flip mats in this tournament and I tried to force the spawning bite.  I didn’t want to deal with the crowd and that was my mistake.”