It was a slow day on the water for a lot of pros during the first day of the 2011 Forrest Wood Cup on Lake Ouachita. It was a slow day for the Chevy On the Water Update Crew too, as we spent more time driving and searching throughout cuts, timber-filled bays and shallow drains where the pros had spread out over a great distance than actually getting updates and shooting photos. Those 58 boats sure can disappear in a hurry.
A weather change today might also have changed the bite a little today, although we’ll have to wait to hear from the pros on whether that was really the case. But the evidence is there. In practice, air temperatures were in triple digits. Today, it was windy, cloudy and mild, topping out in the low 90s, although it felt cooler than that out on the water. Most of the pros I talked to were pecking their way through short fish and trying to scrape together a limit.
Early reports are that a couple of big-name pros have big bags. We’ll have to wait until weigh-in to see how they caught them. For the rest of the field, it was a scrappy, junk-fishing fest. We saw a lot of topwater and some schooling fish in the morning. Jerkbaits, swimbaits, jigs, crankbaits and a variety of soft plastics were also in use around standing timber and steep pockets with long, narrow drains in their back ends. Other pros were parked on deeper spots and junk fishing isolated holes to try and ignite a school. A few were even fishing vertically with drop-shots, which is reminiscent of the 2010 Forrest Wood Cup at Lake Lanier.
From what I saw, Ouachita is a little unpredictable. You can pull into a pocket and catch quality bass schooling on the surface or end up with a school of rats. The fish drift around a little based on the conditions, so timing will be a key aspect of winning.
Another key is capitalizing on bites. Some pros won’t get many quality bites, and weights will be close. A lost fish could be the difference in a few digits on a paycheck, and a couple of pros were singing the blues midday today about fish they lost in the morning. We’ll see how bad it hurts them.
Weigh-in is in about an hour from the time of this blog being written. It’s set to be exciting, so tune in at FLWOutdoors.com.