Top 3 Patterns – Pickwick Lake Regional

After a night of severe storms and heavy rain, the Florence, Ala., area awoke this morning to a beautiful, mild scene on the shores of the Tennessee River. Photo by D. W. Reed II.

October 12, 2014 • David A. Brown • Archives

1st Place – Joshua Moore – 42 Pounds, 14 Ounces

Joshua Moore arrived at the Walmart Bass Fishing League Regional on Pickwick Lake armed with a tip from Walmart FLW Tour pro Tom Monsoor to focus on ledges during the tournament. Heeding Monsoor’s advice, Moore explored a main-river spot outside of Bear Creek in practice, where he located a three-quarter-mile-long ditch that was about 300 yards wide.

Moore decided to camp on the ditch all three days of the event, and when it was done, his 42-pound, 14-ounce total earned the first-place prize of a Ranger Z518C with a 200-hp Evinrude or Mercury outboard and a Chevy 1500 Silverado.

Lined with grass, the ditch held scattered wood throughout its interior depths of 6 to 12 feet. The spot’s location near a major creek made it a seasonal no-brainer.

“The fish were keying on shad,” Moore says. “We were going into the fall transition, and the ditch was close to the ledge and at the mouth of the main feeder creek. The fish just suspend in that ditch and rise up to feed when they need to.”

Moore, who also caught a couple of keepers along the edge of shallow grass at the mouth of a creek near the Natchez Trace Parkway bridge crossing, mostly fished a Reaction Innovations Sweet Beaver rigged with a 5/16-ounce tungsten weight and a 5/0 Trokar flipping hook around wood.

In the grass, he fished a 3/8-ounce buzzbait with a silver blade and a black-and-white skirt, or a 3/8-ounce spinnerbait with a chartreuse split-tail trailer. He threw the buzzbait in calm conditions and the spinnerbait when the wind blew.

2nd Place – Lloyd Pickett Jr. – 41 Pounds, 14 Ounces

He was fishing grass without actually fishing the grass, but odd as that sounds, Lloyd Pickett Jr.’s plan worked well enough to secure the second-place catch of 41 pounds, 14 ounces.

If the lake had been at summer pool, says Pickett, the fish would have been tucked in the shallow grass, but with a big seasonal drawdown just in time for the event, Pickett found that the bigger fish had moved about 15 feet out from the hydrilla and were sitting in 5 to 6 feet of water.

“I was positioning my boat in about 3 feet and casting parallel and outward,” explains Pickett, of Bartlett, Tenn. “It was the exact opposite of how we normally fish grass this time of year. I saw a lot of people actually sitting on top of the big fish and casting toward the shallow grass where the little ones were breaking.”

Targeting grassy areas along State Line Island, Indian Creek and Yellow Creek, Pickett caught most of his fish on a 1/2-ounce green pumpkin-chartreuse Bass Assault Lures jig with a green pumpkin Strike King Rage Craw trailer. He used the full-sized trailer for maximum profile and dipped the pincers in Spike-It chartreuse garlic dye.

He also caught keepers on a Carolina rig with a Zoom Brush Hog in junebug, blueberry and green pumpkin. With the latter, he dipped the tails in chartreuse dye. Pickett’s Carolina rig consisted of a 5/0 hook, 1-ounce weight and 5-foot leader.

“A longer leader gives the fish more time to get that bait before you pick up the weight,” he explains. “That gives me a better chance of hooking him.”

3rd Place – John Hopkins – 37 Pounds, 14 Ounces

With Pickwick’s water level drawn down about 4 feet during the tournament, a lot of the best shallow cover was standing high and dry. Third-place finisher John Hopkins of Hendersonville, Tenn., concentrated his efforts on Seven Mile Island because he knew the area had plenty of still-submerged laydowns that bass would use when daily current flows picked up. His strategy turned up 37 pounds, 14 ounces in three days.

Hopkins hung his hopes solely on a Hoppy’s 3/8-ounce Rattlin’ Brush Bug jig in watermelon candy with a green pumpkin NetBait Paca Chunk trailer. The jig’s cover-friendly shape, plus precision flipping, were essential to his success.

“You just had to put the bait in the meat of the tree,” Hopkins says. “That jig’s designed with a bullet head, and you can hardly hang it up in a tree. My co-anglers were hung up a lot more than I was, but I was able to get in and out of the cover.”

Hopkins says that the current started flowing at around 8 a.m. most days. Before that, the fish were roaming and required a different approach.

“When the current was slow, I caught a few swimming that jig in open water down the shoreline,” Hopkins reveals.