Lake Cumberland Top 5 Patterns Day 1
Smallmouths ruled day one
Smallmouth “overs,” that are over the 18-inch minimum length requirement were the common theme among the top-five pros on day one in the FLW Tour on Lake Cumberland presented by T-H Marine.
Not only did tournament leader Scott Martin score the top spot on day one with the help of four smallmouth “overs,” but others in the top five either had a limit of bronzeback overs or had four overs and a largemouth.
Most pros in the top spots agreed that the Thursday’s bitter weather helped propel the smallmouth bite, making it perhaps a bit better than it would have been otherwise.
2. Cody Bird – Granbury, Texas – 18-13
Cody Bird has already qualified for the Forrest Wood Cup through the Costa FLW Series Championship, so he has the luxury of gambling on the big bite at FLW Tour events. Since the “big bite” at Cumberland comes from playing the dicey 18-inch smallmouth game, that’s exactly what Bird has done.
“I’ve been all in for smallmouth since practice,” Bird says. “I committed to them all day today and actually ended up catching six smallmouth keepers, allowing me to cull one and weigh five.”
Bird says he has found one general area that seems to be holding quite a few of the bigger smallies.
“I think they might be in some phase of the spawn because they seem to stay around in one area,” Bird says. “I don’t know if they’re actually spawning, but I think they’re starting to settle into the areas where they’re going to spawn.”
3. Casey Scanlon – Lenexa, Kan. – 18-8
Though Casey Scanlon did not have multiple smallmouths Thursday, he did complete the Cumberland slam with a smallmouth, a spotted bass and three largemouths, one of which weighed 6-pounds, 6-ounces. taking big bass of the day honors.
Scanlon hails from the Ozarks region of the country and he says some of the fishing on Cumberland fits his style.
“Everything out on my deck is the same stuff I throw back home,” Scanlon says. “A lot of it is reaction baits – with this nasty weather we had today, those kinds of baits worked best. This lake seems to be like Ozark lakes in that the nastier it gets the better they bite.”
Scanlon indicates he is not targeting smallmouths specifically, but rather will take anything that bites, which explains his mixed bag Thursday.
“They area I’m fishing has all three species in it,” he says. “And the lures I’m using will catch all three as well. I don’t care what species it is as long as it will keep.”
4. Clark Wendlandt – Leander, Texas – 18-7
Clark Wendlandt targeted smallmouths for most of the day and ended up with four overs and one largemouth. Interestingly, Wendlandt indicated that he actually caught multiple keeper smallmouths, but his one largemouth was big enough not to get ousted out of the livewell by a smallmouth.
“I have some largemouth stuff I can run close to my smallmouth areas but I mostly committed to smallmouth today because I like smallmouth, this is a good smallmouth fishery and most of all, the weather today was more conducive for smallmouth fishing. I really think the smallmouths were biting well today. It seemed to me they bit all day long and that was a huge help in getting a better idea of where they are positioned. So I kind of used this weather today to find more areas that I might be able to run tomorrow.”
5. Larry Nixon – Bee Branch, Ark. – 18-5
The General rounds out the top five, also with four smallmouths in his limit.
“The water here is rising and I think that tends to scatter the largemouth,” Nixon says. “I could never get a solid largemouth game going and I could catch a few smallmouth – they seemed to me to be a little bit more reliable – so that’s what I committed to the last day and a half of practice. I did run across one nice largemouth while I was fishing for smallmouth today that I weighed in, so I’ll take them any way I can get them.”