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Matt Lee and Swindle Talk Bass, Blue Crabs, and Shopping Carts
Alabama anglers Matt Lee and Gerald Swindle are facing the same flooded and muddy Upper Chesapeake Bay as 106 other Bassmaster Elite Series pros, but on the eve of competition, both offered an admirable attitude of perseverance, and a bit of humor too.
Q: What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen floating in the floodwaters this week?
Matt Lee: I made a few pitches at a PetSmart shopping cart.
Swindle: I saw a matching set of tires and rims, and you can bet I checked to see if they’d fit on my Toyota Tundra.
Q: What is one tip you can give fans at home for fishing high, muddy water?
Matt Lee: Look for places where strong current forms an eddy in shallow water to cast your lure.
Swindle: Make your mind like an Etch A Sketch, start with a clear screen in your head every day. Don’t get mentally rattled about how bad the conditions are. Just keep moving.
Q: Name three lures we can expect to see the Elite Series pros use a bunch this week?
Matt Lee: Spinnerbait, ChatterBait, and a Strike King Rage Cut-R worm.
Swindle: Green pumpkin Chatterbait, spinnerbait, and a black/blue Chatterbait.
Q: How much weight will an angler have to average each day to make the Top 12 cut on the final day here on the Upper Chesapeake?
Matt Lee: 12.8 pounds per day
Swindle: 11 pounds per day
Q: Have you eaten any of the Chesapeake Bay’s famous blue crabs this week?
Matt Lee: I have not, because my wife Abby is highly allergic to shellfish. But I love seafood, so maybe I can talk her into leaving a day earlier than me, and I’ll stay here and hammer down on some blue crabs.
Swindle: I have not, but Lulu made us some shrimp tacos the other night that were awesome!
VanDam Catches a 15-Pounder
Kevin VanDam was the very last angler back to the boat ramp at the end of a brutally tough, rainy, high water, practice day on Tuesday at the Huk Bassmaster Elite at Upper Chesapeake Bay presented by Mossy Oak Fishing.
Fact is, with hints of a beard and wind blown hair, he even looked a bit like an old man of the sea here where the famed smallmouth waters of the Susquehanna River meet the Chesapeake Bay in America’s Mid Atlantic region.
But in typical VanDam fashion, his passion for fishing was still high, and the news he brought back to the dock was positive. Even on one of the more challenging days of his highly decorated career – VanDam still caught ‘em.
By his estimation, he set the hook 60 or 80 times, a bunch of them weighed 6 to 12 pounds. They bit swimbaits, Sexy Dawgs, and even topwater frogs.
His biggest fish of the day was a 15 pounder.
There’s only one problem … VanDam was talking about striped bass, not largemouth or smallmouth.
“When I saw them (striped bass) schooling, as tough as the bass fishing had been all day, I couldn’t stand not to take advantage of an opportunity to set the hook,” says the career long Quantum pro.
“Shaw Grigsby and I sat on that massive school of stripers and absolutely wore ‘em out, to the point they pretty much wrecked all three hooks on my Sexy Dawg (topwater lure),” he grinned.
Striped bass (Morone saxatilis) serve as the State Fish of Maryland, and travel between coastal saltwater to spawn in freshwater rivers like those that decorate the shorelines of this week’s Elite Series event at Havre de Grace, MD, barely northeast of Baltimore.
As for the bass fishing, it’s tougher than Cal “The Iron Man” Ripken Jr.’s record of 2,632 consecutive major league games played, despite nagging injuries that are an apparent part of 21 seasons as a major leaguer.
Nearly 12-inches of rain have fallen since the Elite Series pros started practice in the region where Oriole and Raven fans call home. South winds off the Atlantic are pushing against the muddy waters flowing hard from the north to debacle most all major creeks where largemouth bass reside.
“Bites are far and few between here. It’s super tough,” says VanDam, who waded through floodwaters to back his Tundra down the ramp Tuesday.
Bites are ‘far and few between’ unless you’re talking about striped bass, or as local anglers call them “rocks” or “rockfish” – both nicknames that seem highly fitting for a fishery as tough as the high and muddy Upper Chesapeake this week.
Hard Work and Ice Keep Summer Bass Alive
Not only did fishing teams from 78 universities take their “A game” to Lake Tenkiller for the Carhartt Bassmaster College Series National Championship last week – the brutal mid-summer Oklahoma heat showcased its most intense game face too.
Air temps sweltered around 104, water temps were well over 90, oak trees were dropping leaves in heat distress, and the Carhartt t-shirts worn by B.A.S.S. Director of Conservation, Gene Gilliland and the tournament staff were working overtime to wick away sweat behind the weigh-in stage.
Hot lake water is Gilliland’s worst nightmare. Because as we all learned in junior high school, hot water holds less oxygen than cold, and without hard work and a lot of ice, that can lead to dead tournament bass – a gut wrenching thought to not only all of us who love the sport, but likewise for Gilliland, who is an avid angler, and takes the successful preservation of tournament caught bass very seriously.
“Our goal is to keep the water in each 150 gallon dip tank backstage five to seven degrees cooler than the lake water. So at Tenkiller, that meant we had to keep adding ice until the water was about 80 degrees, and we constantly monitored water temperature and add ice to maintain that range,” says Gilliland.
Gilliland started each tournament day in Tahlequah with 1,000 pounds of ice stored backstage in a towable commercial icehouse. At a summer high school tournament on Kentucky Lake two years ago, he used 7,000 pounds of ice throughout the event.
Not only do water temps need to be cooled in the dip tanks teams hold their bagged fish in as they make their way to the stage, but water must also be cooled in the B.A.S.S. Live Release pontoon boat tanks used to transport tournament caught bass back to the lake for release after they’ve been weighed in. And each pontoon boat can haul 600 pounds of bass at a time.
Certainly Gilliland’s success rate in the preservation of bass during and after weigh-in increases if anglers work hard to take care of their catch throughout the tournament day, and that begins with proper livewell maintenance. He offers these six steps all of us can follow to be better caretakers of our summertime catch.
Spend five or ten bucks for a swimming pool thermometer you can keep in your livewell in order to know if you’re maintaining a temp of five to seven degrees less than the lake temp. (Note: Keeping your water too cold is nearly as dangerous as letting it get too hot.)
(1) Fill up your livewells really early in the morning on “fill” or “fresh” mode.
(2) Switch quickly to “recirculate” mode, and begin adding ice until the temp is five to seven degrees less than the lake temp. Expect to add ice throughout the day to maintain the cooler temp.
(3) Be sure to run aerators on “manual” or full time rather than on a timer to help maximize oxygen replacement.
(4) Then, twice a day, flush out half the water in your livewells that’s sure to be contaminated by ammonia excreted from the bass swimming in your livewell water – and refill with fresh lake water.
(5) Finally, have plenty of extra ice onboard. Frozen plastic bottles full of ice floating inside your livewells can be a much more efficient than adding cubed ice.
Follow these steps, and you can proudly count on more than 95% of your bass being released alive after weigh-in, just like Gilliland and all the hard working folks on the B.A.S.S. tournament staff.
“We always donate the very few bass that don’t survive to local charity,” says Gilliland. “But lots of ice, the constant monitoring of holding tank temps, and hard work are the biggest keys to our success rate.”
Project T 2018 ICAST Edition 4 【VOL. 51】TATULA 100
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Garrett Enders (left) and Cody Huff of Bethel University won the 2018 Carhartt Bassmaster College Series National Championship presented by Bass Pro Shops held on Tenkiller Lake out of Tahlequah, Okla., with a three-day total weight of 41 pounds, 6 ounces.
Photo by Ronnie Moore/B.A.S.S.
TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — A little adversity builds character, they say, but the wire-to-wire winners of the 2018 Carhartt Bassmaster College Series National Championship presented by Bass Pro Shops on Oklahoma’s Tenkiller Lake Saturday said it also builds a bundle of nerves.
After two solid, trouble-free days and even with a 6-pound, 2-ounce lead going into the final day, Bethel University’s Garrett Enders and Cody Huff felt they left the door open when Campbellsville University pulled a miracle from the stingy, sinfully hot waters of Tenkiller — the biggest bag of the contest.
The Tahlequah crowd on the Northeastern State University campus erupted in screams as Campbellsville’s Bradley Dunagan and Nick Ratliff dragged a big green 6-pound anchor across the stage and posted 18 pounds, 2 ounces to climb from fifth place to snatch the hot seat away from West Virginia University’s Nolan Minor and Casey Lanier, who posted 15-4 of their own on the final day.
With just three fish in their bag and a deficit of 7-4 to cover for the win, Enders confessed he had no words to describe the feeling and Huff just said, “I’m nervous, I’m ready to get it going.”
Their three hardest-won fish of the tournament sealed the win with 9-2 for the day and a total of 41-6 for the three days on Tenkiller.
In addition to taking the championship title, Enders and Huff join the Campbellsville and West Virginia teams, along with Cole Burdeshaw and Peyton McCord of Auburn University as the Top 4 head to the 2018 Carhartt College Bracket presented by Bass Pro Shops, set for Aug. 14-16 on Milford Lake out of Junction City, Kan.
A berth in the 2019 Bassmaster Classic presented by DICK’S Sporting Goods, set for March 15-17 on the Tennessee River hosted at Knoxville, will be on the line for the eight anglers there, who will face off in the bracket-style, catch-and-release contest.
The college championship was tough and inconsistent as promised with sultry heat the first two days. Today’s finale brought a little break in the heat, but an invasion of recreational boaters that kept things topsy-turvy.
Enders and Huff were the only anglers to limit both of the first two days, and they did it quickly each morning, and without error.
“We hadn’t lost a fish all week; we lost four keepers today,” Huff said. “I guess you have to pay your dues.” Saturday they also sacrificed 14 flutter spoons to the docks of Tenkiller.
The first fish lost offered an indication of the lackluster luck factor ahead as it snagged a dockside obstacle. “He jumped up and actually got my jigging spoon’s hook caught on a rope holding a minnow bucket,” Huff said. “He was just hanging there and all we could do was watch him get off.”
All of their fish came on either a 5 1/2-inch Strike King Sexy Spoon or a 7/8-ounce Jewel Jigging Spoon as they targeted sunken cedars around docks with most hits happening between 15 and 20 feet.
“Most everything hit it on the way down,” Huff said. “You drop it and when it gets to 20 then you just work it back up.” One of the good fish missed Saturday followed the spoon nearly up to the boat, however. “He nailed it and dove but he came off,” he said.
Campbellsville’s Dunagan and Ratliff also worked spoons around marinas, but worked so hard at it they had to make a run to the nearest Bass Pro Shops, in Broken Arrow, to restock after Day 2.
“We just started looking for spider webs, pitching where nobody else had been,” Ratliff said. “We lost like 15 spoons today.”
Their two best lures were a 4-inch Strike King Sexy Spoon and a 3.75-inch Talon Custom Lures Lake Fork Flutter Spoon. “It’s a little heavier on a shorter frame so you can slide it back in there,” Ratliff said. A key bait their first two days was a Zoom Hand-Poured Trick Worm on a drop shot.
The Auburn anglers took a different route to the top. They targeted offshore brushpiles at 15 to 20 feet with a standup jighead and finesse worms, a strategy that proved hard with increased recreational traffic Saturday.
“We should have been flipping spoons under docks,” Burdeshaw said.
West Virginia’s Nolan Minor said they pieced together a variety of bites, junk fishing from the dam to a “magic tree” as far up the Illinois River as they could run.
“Today was the first day we caught more than one fish on the same bait,” Minor said. Saturday they caught two on a 6-inch Mega bass Magdraft, two on a 3-inch Keitech swimbait on a spot loaded with schooling bass, and a Berkley Dredger 25.5 deep-diving crankbait.
For Garrett, the win holds extra meaning as nearly four years earlier to the day, July 19, 2014, he and then-partner Nick Osman won the first Bassmaster High School Championship presented by Carhartt on Kentucky Lake. Garrett is now the only angler to win both and high school and college championship event in B.A.S.S. history.
“You can’t help but remember something like that,” he said. Deciding which was the more thrilling day took little thought, however.
“Oh, this is 10 times better,” he said.
A 6-3 largemouth caught on Day 2 by Hayden Bartee of Alabama’s Jefferson State University held up as Carhartt Big Bass for a $500 Carhartt gift certificate.
For more information, visit Bassmaster.com/college.
2018 Carhartt Bassmaster College Series Title Sponsor: Carhartt
2018 Carhartt Bassmaster College Series Presenting Sponsor: Bass Pro Shops
2018 Carhartt Bassmaster College Series Platinum Sponsor: Toyota
2018 Carhartt Bassmaster College Series Premier Sponsors: Mercury, Minn Kota, Nitro Boats, Power-Pole, Skeeter Boats, Triton Boats, Yamaha, ABU Garcia, Berkley, Huk, Humminbird
2018 Carhartt Bassmaster College Series Supporting Sponsors: Mossy Oak Fishing, Phoenix Boats, Livingston Lures, Lowrance
About B.A.S.S.
B.A.S.S. is the worldwide authority on bass fishing and keeper of the culture of the sport, providing cutting edge content on bass fishing whenever, wherever and however bass fishing fans want to use it. Headquartered in Birmingham, Ala., the 500,000-member organization’s fully integrated media platforms include the industry’s leading magazines (Bassmaster and B.A.S.S. Times), website (Bassmaster.com), television show (The Bassmasters on ESPN2), radio show (Bassmaster Radio), social media programs and events. For 50 years, B.A.S.S. has been dedicated to access, conservation and youth fishing.
The Bassmaster Tournament Trail includes the most prestigious events at each level of competition, including the Bassmaster Elite Series, Bass Pro Shops Bassmaster Open Series, Academy Sports + Outdoors B.A.S.S. Nation presented by Magellan Outdoors, Carhartt Bassmaster College Series presented by Bass Pro Shops, Mossy Oak Fishing Bassmaster High School Series presented by DICK’S Sporting Goods, Bassmaster Team Championship and the ultimate celebration of competitive fishing, the GEICO Bassmaster Classic presented by DICK’S Sporting Goods.