Quick Bites: FLW Lake Murray, Day 1
Wal-Mart FLW Tour
Lake Murray, Columbia, S.C.
Opening round, Wednesday
You wish you fished like a girl … When pro J.T. Kenney of Frostburg, Md., carried a sack with one short bass to the weigh-in tent, it appeared that he was doing the gentlemanly thing by helping his co-angler partner, Laura Aldridge, bring her catch to the scale. But that was not the case. Aldridge in fact had her own sack full of fish right behind him. Her five-bass limit weighed 13-12 and landed her in fourth place in the Co-angler Division Wednesday while Kenney’s one little munchkin topped the scale at a whopping 1-8, landing him in 163rd place in the Pro Division. And don’t think he didn’t hear about it from his fellow competitors. “I got totally annihilated,” Kenney said. “Dude, they bit her stuff and not mine.” Unlike the snickering peanut gallery, Aldridge – a Berkley, Mich., native who’s fishing in just her second FLW tournament ever – was more diplomatic about trouncing her pro. “I feel great about being tied for fourth place, more so than I do about kicking his butt,” she said. But Kenney took it all in stride. “Oh, it’s great. I love it,” he said. “After she had me three (fish) to nothing, I was rooting for her more than me. I figured I’d probably get more press out of this than if I placed second.” … Aldridge wasn’t the only lady angler making waves on Lake Murray Wednesday. Pamela Wood of Bono, Ark., pulled into sixth place on the co-angler side with a two-bass weight of 13-5. That’s right. Two bass. Her big bass weighed 7-14 and her “small” bass weighed 5-7.
Big. … Lake Murray was practically throwing huge fish into competitors’ boats Wednesday. Unofficially, more than a dozen anglers – pro and co-angler – weighed in a bass over 7 pounds for the big-bass contest. And those were just the anglers who actually tried for big bass. No one knows how many single fish weren’t officially weighed.
Bass. … On the pro side, red-hot Dave Lefebre of Erie, Pa., took the Snickers Big-Bass Award with a 9-pound, 1-ounce whale. But it was a co-angler, day-one leader Greg Scott of Dearborn, Mich., who weighed in the biggest bass of a big-bass day: a 9-10 monster. Scott’s fish was just 5 ounces short of setting the 2003 FLW record for biggest fish. (At Lake Okeechobee, pro Andy Morgan caught a 9-15.) Another co-angler, Masafumi Kato of Japan, caught one that weighed 9-6.
Bonanza. … While 85 pros caught five-bass limits Wednesday, 13 of them weighed in over 20 pounds. As it stands, the pros are on pace to break the record for all-time heaviest top-10 cut weight on the FLW Tour. The 1998 Kentucky Lake tournament cut weight was 37-7. If you double 10th-place pro Robert Karbas‘ catch of 21-10 Wednesday, that puts the two-day weight to beat at a record 43-4. … Also on a record-setting pace are the top five pros, who each stand a chance to break the FLW’s all-time opening-round weight record. The record was set by Peter Thliveros at Kentucky Lake in 1998 with a 47-5 two-day total. The top five from day one at Lake Murray all caught more than half of that Wednesday. For instance, if leader Darrel Robertson manages to double his weight of 26-13, he would smash the record with 53-10.
The one to watch … Seventh-place pro Dan Morehead. This year, you can’t pry him off the leaderboard with a crowbar. With just three regular-season tournaments left after this one – one of them at Morehead’s home waters, Kentucky Lake – he has to be the odds-on favorite for Angler of the Year if he finishes well here this week.
Sound bite
“I don’t know how these guys are getting the big ones in. They’re tearing all my stuff up, jumping over the boat and everything.”
– Pro Gerald Swindle, who seemed perplexed by the number of sacks weighing over 20 pounds Wednesday – and by the fact that he couldn’t land a few of the big ones himself. He still managed to catch five bass weighing 14-4 to start the tourney in 48th place.
Quick links, Day 1:
Photos (You’ve got to check out some of these fish!)
Results
Tomorrow’s pairings
Press release
Robertson puts on fishing clinic at Lake Murray