Cody Meyer Learning to Love (or Live with) Florida

KISSIMMEE, Fla. – Cody Meyer has had time in abundance to reflect. He’s just off the road, having left the snow-plowed highways near his Northern California home to make the 3,000-mile cross-country trek to Florida for the Bass Pro Tour B&W Trailer Hitches Stage One Presented by Power-Pole.

It’s a pioneering trek, of sorts. Meyer will help launch the MLF Bass Pro Tour on Tuesday, Jan. 29, competing with SCORETRACKER urgency in a live competition under MLF rules. There’s plenty to ponder on a 45-hour cross-country drive, and Florida filled much of that head time.

Tournament experience has shaped a love/hate relationship for Meyer with the Sunshine State.

“You really love Florida when the fishing is good,” says Meyer. “And you dislike Florida — I won’t say ‘hate it’ — when there’s a cold front. Just a 5-degree temperature drop and the fish won’t move. That makes for a humongous challenge. At times you’ll swear there are no fish in an entire system.”

Picking prime water is another challenge. Meyer recalls his first tournament in Florida.

“I grew up watching Roland Martin fishing Okeechobee and thinking, ‘Florida looks like the best place in the entire world!’” Meyer reflects. “I was so excited. Then I arrived – never in my entire life was I so confused! Every piece of Florida water looks phenomenal.”

That first Okeechobee event was a complete bust.

“Running all over the lake” was a loser’s strategy, he learned. Florida fish group up in small areas. Meyer took the lesson to heart.

“My next tournament in Florida, I picked an area and said, ‘I’m not going to lift this trolling motor,’” he remembers. “I fished that area the entire time. I knew tournaments had been won there. That’s the approach I took.”

Translating from California

Meyer has enjoyed an education unique even to California anglers. He grew up fishing for spotted bass on deep, clear reservoirs, and has caught record-breaking spots in his home state.

“But I’ve lived on a solid grass fishery in California for the last seven or eight years, and it has Florida-strain bass,” he adds. “I’ve learned how to catch them out of grass. You learn different techniques —flipping, throwing swim jigs, and little tricks you wouldn’t pick up fishing for northern-strain bass. That’s been huge for me.”

Meyer prides himself on outside-the-box thinking. He has modified drop-shot and other West Coast finesse techniques to give Florida bass a different look. But he’s the first to admit to reverting to the bread-and-butter baits of the locals.

“It’s crazy,” he says. “These fish are so basic. They like black and blue. They like Chatterbaits, swim jigs and the stuff you flip. Day to day and year after year, the techniques will work.”

His favorite is a Strike King Ocho, a 6-inch stick worm in black/blue or watermelon red.

“No matter what, that stick worm will be on my deck, and I can probably speak for every fisherman in Florida when it comes to that,” he says. “It’s no secret. They love that profile.”

But don’t expect him to die with a stick worm (or any other bait, for that matter).

In his first Top 5 finish in a Florida event, he caught his fish on different baits each of the first three days before going back to his Day 1 bait on Day 4.

“You can fish the same area every day, but the fish change day to day,” he concludes. “So my biggest takeaway is you have to approach each day completely new. That was the hardest thing I had to adjust to.”