Wagner Wallops 23-15 on Dale Hollow
With 15 wins in MLF competition – three of the five most recent coming on Dale Hollow – it should surprise no one to see Adam Wagner’s name atop the leaderboard of the second Toyota Series presented by A.R.E. Central Division. With 23 pounds, 15 ounces on Day 1, Wagner is now in a position to follow up his win at Dale Hollow to close out 2020 with another against an even larger field.
His fall Toyota Series win was predicated on finding something different during the tournament (a massive school of big largemouth hanging out at an intersection between two points in nearly 30 feet of water). This time around, Wagner is doing something very similar to the rest of the field: flipping shallow cover that was about 7 feet out of the water just a few days ago.
“I’m flipping shallow,” Wagner says of his Day 1 program. “You’ve just got to get close to the bank and you have to be real good at flipping.”
While Wagner was keying on the cleanest water he could find (a tall task considering most everything off the main lake is the color of hot chocolate right now), he says he didn’t see any of the fish he was flipping to – though it’s possible he could have.
“If I looked closer I might have saw them,” he quips. “Some of them were that shallow.”
A good portion of the field fished shallow on Day 1, but the conditions just seemed to match perfectly with what Wagner chose to do after spending much of his practice looking shallow. It was a nasty day by pretty much any standard, with rain, falling temperatures, wind and cloud cover hanging around pretty much all day.
“This was just one of those days,” Wagner adds. “This was a Dale Hollow day. It was just a perfect day. When you’ve got a cold front behind you and you’ve got clouds, these fish just bite.”
The forecasted sunshine and drastically colder temperatures (it is expected to be in the low 30s at takeoff) do concern Wagner, though, particularly the lack of cloud cover. He expects to run the same areas as on Wednesday but potentially focus on fishing “different stuff.”
And while Wagner is capable of catching another big bag, Wednesday may have been his perfect window for catching his biggest bag of the week for two reasons: the weather and the fact that March 31 is just his lucky day on Dale Hollow.
“The biggest stringer I ever caught off a bed was March 31 a couple years ago,” he said when discussing lake conditions just a couple days prior to the start of the event.
After weigh-in on Day 1, Wagner posited that March 31 might just be his magic date.
“Today’s [bag] was bigger,” he quips. “That’s the biggest bag I’ve ever caught here. It’s just my day.”
Still, April 1 could be a close second if Wagner is able to bring a decent stringer to the scale and make the Top 10 cut. His plan for that is simple.
“My plan is to just try to get five bites,” he explains. “I had nine keeper bites today and today is one of those days when they bite. Tomorrow is going to be totally different.”
Different, sure, but few anglers in this field have the experience Wagner has on Dale Hollow. And if anyone is capable of making the right adjustments at the right time, it’s the man who did just that five short months ago.
Top 10 Pros
1. Adam Wagner – 23 – 15 (5)
2. Mickey Beck – 20 – 02 (5)
3. Derek Remitz – 18 – 12 (5)
4. Billy Hall – 17 – 06 (5)
5. Steve Whitaker – 16 – 15 (5)
6. Ryan Salzman – 15 – 12 (5)
6. Steve Lopez – 15 – 12 (5)
8. William Beutjer – 15 – 06 (5)
9. Vernon Lowe – 15 – 04 (5)
10. Wayne Christopher – 15 – 01 (5)
Jolley Flips for Strike King Co-Angler Lead
Tim Jolley didn’t practice for this event, but he didn’t really have to considering he lives on Dale Hollow (“born and raised”) and has seen huge water fluctuations before. He knows when the water is up as high as it is, the winning program typically boils down to finding some cleaner water and fishing slow.
“You can’t fish fast right now,” he says. “You can’t adjust in this. You’ve got to go somewhere where it’s a little clearer.”
That, of course, boils down to who a co-angler is paired with, and Jolley offered plenty of praise for his Day 1 boater, Will Norton, who weighed in one fish for 1 pound, 3 ounces on Wednesday after Jolley spent all day flipping parallel to banks behind him.
While Jolley doesn’t love the conditions, that won’t preclude him from having another great day on Thursday.
“I ain’t comfortable with it, but I’ve seen it before, about seven or eight times, I guess,” he says. “I’ve seen it higher than this.”