HOT SPRINGS, Arkansas – For Lake Ouachita Veteran Scott Suggs, this week’s Major League Fishing Summit Select in Hot Springs has been a case of “shoulda been”.
Suggs, who lives 45 minutes west of Hot Springs in Alexander, Arkansas, has fished Ouachita since he was a child. Five of Suggs’ career FLW Top 10s have come on this impoundment of the Ouachita River, including the 2006 Forrest Wood Cup, when he became the first bass angler in history to win a $1 million in a tournament.
But like fellow Arkansan Kevin Short, Suggs spent his entire Elimination Round trying to make something happen in a section of the lake that he bluntly identifies as his least favorite.
And trying. And trying. And trying.
“When they handed me the map this morning, I knew I was sunk,” Suggs lamented after catching only two fish for 3 pounds, 15 ounces in his Elimination Round. “I was beat from the minute they showed me the zone we were fishing. I knew that I’d try to survive off of history, and that I’d try to make it happen where fish used to live. They just don’t live there anymore.”
The section of Ouachita in question – the upper end of the lake where the South Fork and North Fork Ouachita rivers meet at the mouth of the mainstem Ouachita – has been ignored by local tournament anglers for over a decade because of a dramatic change in the lake’s vegetation. Formerly one of the best grass fisheries in the country due to its hearty growth of Elodea (American waterweed), major swaths of Ouachita lost their grass to an aquatic insect that was introduced into the lake in the mid-2000s to combat the growth of invasive Hydrilla.
“Back in the heyday in the 1990s when we had grass on the upper end of the lake, a lot of tournaments were won right on the edge of that zone,” Suggs said. “I can’t tell you how many tournaments I’ve won just a little further down the lake (outside the Elimination Round zone). Mother Nature made things a little more difficult, too.”
As the Select field has found out through the Elimination Rounds, Ouachita as a whole is off-kilter thanks to capricious water levels. Suggs went into the week expecting to find a shallow bite on wolf packs of spotted bass, but instead found fish moving off the bank as the Army Corps of Engineers pulled water to compensate for the heavy rainfall.
“With a full moon in May, we should be seeing bedding bluegill in 2 to 4 feet of water, but I haven’t seen a single bed,” Suggs admitted. “As fast as (the Corps) is sucking that water out, bluegill won’t build a bed knowing that it would be high and dry in a couple of days. I felt like I could’ve won the round in five casts if I could find the right group of fish, but I never found them. It just goes to show you, in this MLF format, a ‘hometown hero’ fishing on their home lake can get spanked. I sure did.”