I love September because it’s when college football gets started. I always pull for the Florida Gators, but I really don’t have a favorite team. I just love any exciting pound-for-pound football game that comes down to which team performs best late in the fourth quarter. I get chills when that happens.
I’m in the fourth quarter of the Bassmaster Opens EQ race. Just as every play matters in college football, every decision and every cast I make during the final two EQ tournaments of the season will be critical.
It felt really good to be leading the seventh tournament of the series at Watts Bar on Day 1. I made the Top 10 there and jumped up to 13th place in the overall EQ standings. I have to move up four more places over the final two tournaments to qualify for the 2024 Elite Series.
September also marks the beginning of fishing’s fall transition. We’re getting cooler nights, and the bass are starting to migrate into shallow water. That works in my favor.
The bass are more active now, but you have to cover a lot more water to find them. You usually can’t win on one spot. I was lucky to find a good group of bass on the first day at Watts Bar, but I burned 35 gallons of gas every day to sack what I did.
That’s the way I love to fish. Crank up the Yamaha, jump the Phoenix on plane and run from place to place.
The cooler water makes the bass more inclined to come up for a topwater bait. At Watts Bar I caught several nice ones on Berkley’s Choppo and the new Swamp Lord Frog I designed with Berkley. That bait is solid.
Topwater baits have fascinated me since my brothers and I grew up fishing them with my grandfather. My enjoyment of watching bass explode on a topwater plug is half the reason I got into professional bass fishing. The strikes just make you quit breathing for five seconds. Even 2-pounders look like 5-pounders when they attack.
What really surprised me when I got to Watts Bar was the healthy grass that was growing everywhere. That lake is one of the prettiest places I’ve fished in a long time.
Even though the grass was loaded with baitfish, the bass I caught from it were skinny. You catch a 16-inch bass from the grass at Guntersville, and it will weigh 2 1/2 to 2 3/4 pounds. At Watts Bar a 16-inch bass didn’t weigh 2 pounds. With all the grass and baitfish I saw there, I expect the bass will soon be putting on much-needed weight.
At Watts Bar guys were catching bass doing everything from casting to fish they could see on forward-facing sonar to froggin’ matted grass. I expect many different tactics will also work at the next EQ on Lake of the Ozarks. Bass will be caught there on topwater, with forward-facing sonar and flipping wood, rock and docks.
There are millions of docks at Lake of the Ozarks, and you can catch good bass from one end of the lake to the other. I expect it will take at least 13 pounds a day to make the final cut. The lake has spotted bass, but I believe largemouth will make up 95% of the catch.
I’ll be taking the 1 1/2-ounce tungsten punch weights off my flipping rods and tying on jigs and soft plastic baits. I don’t have the best track record at Lake of the Ozarks, but I need to do well enough to at least hold my place in the EQ standings.
I told myself while I was practicing for Watts Bar that qualifying for the Elite Series is going to come down to the second or third day at the final EQ on the Harris Chain. I’m hoping it doesn’t come down to a Hail Mary cast.
