Rapala Pros Gamble and Win in New York Bassmaster Tournament
Taking chances paid off last week for three Rapala bass pros who finished in the top 10 in a Bassmaster tournament on New York’s St. Lawrence River.
They weren’t taking chances, however, on what to fish with, but rather where and how to fish. And their gambles paid off – Brandon Palaniuk won the tournament, Ott DeFoe placed third and Bernie Schultz placed sixth.
Palaniuk’s big run pays off
Palaniuk won the tournament
Because Palaniuk needed a tournament win to qualify for next February’s Bassmaster Classic – the so-called “Super Bowl of bass fishing” – he took a chance on a 220-mile round-trip run through waves as big as six feet to Lake Ontario. Depending on weather and waves, the gambit would afford him only 30 minutes to two hours of fishing time, and would not guarantee that he’d be able to get back to weigh-ins in time to score his catch.
“I was making such a huge gamble,” Palaniuk told Bassmaster tournament emcee Dave Mercer on the weigh-in stage Sunday. “I had all the confidence in the world that I was going to win that gamble, but it’s still a gamble – there’s so many things that can go wrong.”
But the gamble paid off. Palaniuk sacked consecutive bags of 23.9 pounds, 21.5, 20.9 and 23.5 to win the tournament and the $100,000 prize.
“I literally had nothing to lose,” Palaniuk told Bassmaster TV’s Mark Zona and Tommy Sanders in an interview webcast after the tournament on bassmaster.com. That’s because decent – or even good – finishes in the season’s last two tournaments would not earn him enough Angler of the Year (AOY) points to qualify for the Classic. Only a tournament win would qualify him. Bassmaster’s “win and you’re-in” provision awards a Classic berth to any angler that wins a Bassmaster Elite Series event.
Of the 99 other pros fishing the tournament, few others ran to Lake Ontario. And none ran as far as Palaniuk. One top contender proclaimed such a run not worth the risk.
“A lot of these guys were afraid to make that gamble out on the lake because of [AOY] points,” Palaniuk explained.
For those competitors, a conservative game plan would likely result in a good enough finish and enough points to maintain their places above the cutline for Classic qualification. Palaniuk, however, was below the cut.
“I literally had to win,” he said. “It made it a lot easier to gamble, I guess.”
After finding big fish in the Monday-Wednesday practice period before the Thursday-Sunday tournament, Palaniuk believed he had the winning strategy – provided weather and water conditions would allow a long, risky run four days in a row.
“I had such a good practice day on Tuesday that I knew I was going, no matter what,” Palaniuk said on the weigh-in stage after being crowned champion. “I felt like that was my only shot to win.”
You can follow Brandon Palaniuk on Facebook and Twitter.
Schultz gambles on shallow bite, when most others are fishing deep
Bernie Schultz took a gamble and it paid off
Florida pro Bernie Schultz took a chance on a shallow bite, when most other top contenders were fishing deep with drop-shot rigs. The gamble paid off with a sixth-place finish, his best since Bassmaster launched the Elite Series tournament format in 2006.
“A lot of big fish were caught deep on drop shotting,” Schultz acknowledged last week in an exclusive interview. “I don’t mind drop shotting, but if they’re going to eat a reaction lure, you can bet that’s what I’m going to be doing… I guarantee I had more fun than [the drop shotters] did, because topwater is a blast.”
Schultz’s main pattern was fan-casting a Rapala Skitter Walk topwater bait over the tops of shoals and humps within a mile-long stretch of the St. Lawrence near the mouth of Lake Ontario.
“And that was fun!” Schultz gushed. “I had some big fish blow up on it… They weren’t really in a feeding mode – a lot of them would strike the bait in aggravation. But I did get a lot of those bites.”
And although he knew other anglers were mining the depth for leading limits, Schultz liked what he saw up shallow. “It was just ideal habitat,” he recalled. “And you could see the fish swimming around, on a calm day. There were ‘sweet spots’ in that mile-long stretch that I focused on.”
Some of his spots were as shallow as three feet, but he spent most of his time targeting shoals that topped out at six to 10 feet.
“Then they would drop off right into almost infinity,” Schultz said, only half kidding. “That river is deep. There was 50 feet of water right next to ten foot of water. There were breaklines related to really healthy… shallow habitat, so the fish had a chance to move up and feed or suspend off the drop in a matter of just 10 yards.”
When bass weren’t up and active on top of a shoal, “where the wind would let me work a topwater,” Schultz explained, he would throw a Rapala X-Rap along the shoal edge.
“It seemed like whatever the prevailing wind was at the time, the fish would act accordingly,” he said. “And generally, the windier [it was], they moved off to the deeper water.”
You can follow Bernie Schultz on Facebook and read his columns at Bassmaster.com. Ott DeFoe changed his fishing place the last day
Ott DeFoe used VMC Dropshot hooks in his finesse rig during the St. Lawrence event.
After a conservative game plan in the main river channel qualified Ott DeFoe for championship Sunday, he gambled on the tournament’s final day, making a long run to fish the Duck Island area in Lake Ontario. Not only had he not fished there in any of the first three tournament days, he had not practiced there either.
“I did something today that’s not really my style,” DeFoe said on the weigh-in stage. “Today I went for a boat ride… I said I’m in ninth place, I want to go up, I’m going to go for a ride.’ That’s generally not my style. I’m not that kind of a risk taker… Apparently it was a good decision today.”
DeFoe caught all the fished he weighed in the tournament on a VMC drop-shot hook.
The “neat thing” about the St. Lawrence River/Lake Ontario fishery, DeFoe said, is that “you can go out there and catch 18 pounds in five feet of water or you could do it 30 feet of water.”
Although good populations of smallmouth swim in the waters in and around DeFoe’s Knoxville, TN, home, he acknowledged that Yankee smallies and Southern smallies are practically a different breed.
“They are a different animal, there’s no question,” he said in an interview with the podcast Fantasy Fishing Insider. “The smallmouth where I live, you want a cloudy, rainy, nasty kind of day and that’s when they really bite. But up there – and it seems backwards – if you get a flat, slick, calm day, bright sunny skies… the fishing is just phenomenal.”
Northern smallmouth “really used to confuse me a lot,” DeFoe said Sunday on the Bassmaster weigh-in stage. “I don’t know if I’ve really got them figured out, but I sure am having a lot of fun with them.”
You can follow Ott DeFoe on Facebook and Twitter.