Tops up north

Butch Dobransky wins “smallmouth circuit” standings title with a unique game plan – he fished for largemouth

The 2001 EverStart Series Northern Division was a haven for prolific smallmouth bass anglers. The tournament waters of Lake Ontario, Lake Erie and the Mississippi River – all renowned brown-bass fisheries – had many EverStart anglers preparing for this year’s Northern Division by boning up on their smallmouth bass-fishing technique.

Not Butch Dobransky. He’s a largemouth fisherman.

“At most of these tournaments, everybody said it was a `smallmouth tournament.’ But I’m a flipper and a pitcher,” says Dobransky. “My game plan was to stay in it with largemouth.”

The game plan worked. Dobransky won the EverStart Series Northern Division standings title with a whopping 722 points for the year, surpassing the next closest angler by 55 points. He didn’t miss a semifinal-round cut all year long in the Northern Division and finished no worse than 28th place in all four regular-season events.

On the other hand – and remarkably for the standings winner – Dobransky also finished no better than 13th place and failed to make a single final-round cut.

“It seems like I was pretty good at making the third day, but not very good at making the fourth day,” he says. “But that’s pretty common when you don’t get a lot of practice.”

But consistency’s the name of the game in the standings race. It was Dobransky’s unconventional, largemouth-oriented approach to smallmouth tournaments that made him the most consistent angler in the EverStart Series Northern Division in 2001.

Fishing away from pressure

It’s not easy to win a tournament circuit’s standings race, particularly in the Northern Division where rough weather and jumpy fish made repeated success tough to come by. Just ask Kevin Vida, a heavy favorite who began the season with a disappointing 118th-place finish on the Mississippi River then came back to win the next tourney at Lake Ontario, or Tom Monsoor, who won at La Crosse then fell out of standings contention by season’s end with a 103rd-place finish at Detroit. It just wasn’t easy to stay consistent on the new northern circuit.

Dobransky, however, found a way to catch weight steadily by targeting largemouth bass in the smallmouth-laden waters.

“Largemouth are more consistent, for one thing,” he says. “Plus, everybody passed over the largemouth to fish for smallmouth at the tournaments. That was my whole game plan: to fish for the fish that weren’t pressured.”

Another factor led to his decision to go bigmouth hunting. Dobransky works full time at a steel mill in his hometown of Canton, Ohio, often working the night shift, and he had trouble taking days off to practice onsite for tournaments. More than once he returned home late on a weekend night from a long road trip to fish a tournament, backed his boat into his garage and turned right around to go to work.

Deprived of serious practice time to find deeper smallmouth bass, he turned to fishing for shallow-water largemouths, which were easier to find and catch on short notice. In addition, Dobransky prepared for tournaments by doing what he called “specialized practice” on lakes near Canton.

“I spent a lot of time studying maps. I tried to pick a lake around here that I thought was similar to the one I’d be fishing,” he says. “That way, when I got there, I’d have everything that I needed to fish with.”

So, armed only with cursory knowledge of the tournament waters, he would arrive on the scene a day or two before competition began and get to work.

Workingman’s winner

Dobransky, 55, began bass fishing in the `60s almost by accident. A muskie fisherman initially, he would cast for bass when the muskies weren’t biting. Finding he had a knack for hooking bass, his tournament career ensued with local events in the `80s. He joined up with the Red Man Tournament Trail in 1995 and enjoyed moderate success in the following years. In 1999 he made the All-American in La Crosse, Wis., where he finished in eighth place and won the day-two Big Bass award.

When he saw that La Crosse was the opening tournament site on the new Northern Division circuit, he decided to give the EverStart Series a try in 2001.

“That’s one of my favorite places to fish,” he says. “When I saw the schedule come out I told my wife, `Why don’t we go and do that?'”

At La Crosse, while others focused on smallmouths in the current of the Mississippi River, Dobransky pitched and flipped his way under willow trees along the bank. He caught 19 pounds, 12 ounces of largemouth bass over three days and captured 23rd place.

The second tournament, at Thousand Islands Lake Ontario, presented a problem for him when locations he had planned to fish suddenly disappeared. Dobransky found that lakeshore owners had pulled many of his intended fishing docks out of the water. He was forced to adjust. However, Lake Ontario also kicked up enough heavy seas to keep most other competitors off the big water and away from the bigger bass. Dobransky found some docks to flip to and captured his second semifinal-round finish, 28th place, with three days worth of mainly largemouth bass at 34 pounds, 11 ounces.

At Sandusky Bay, the year’s third event, Dobransky battled the big waves of Lake Erie and came out with a three-day weight of 46 pounds, 4 ounces to capture his best finish of the year in 18th place. The conditions at Sandusky, while windy and difficult, helped him tune up his smallmouth drifting technique – a tactic that would come in handy at the last stop of the season.

The fourth Northern Division event was held just around the corner from Sandusky on the Detroit River, providing competitors access to much of the same productive water on Lake Erie. Conditions were similar to the previous tournament, only worse. The heavy wind on the open water blew a lot of top pros back into the shelter of the river. Dobransky toughed it out on Lake Erie and landed a solid 17 pounds, 2 ounces of bass the first two days, finding himself in the semifinals for the fourth tournament in a row. Again, he focused on stationary fishing for largemouth at rock piles, but the wind also caused him to use the tube bait-drifting technique for smallmouth that many anglers were employing.

“I don’t drift unless I absolutely cannot stand up,” he says. “We were fishing in three- to five-foot waves.”

The other pros picked up the pace in the semifinals and Dobransky’s three-bass, 12-pound, 1-ounce stringer on day three gave him an 18th-place finish for the event. But his fourth top-30 finish of the year also clinched the standings title.

While not as sweet as a tournament victory, the standings title meant a lot to Dobransky, who, unlike many pros, competes without any sponsor help. He considers it a kind of victory for the working-class angler.

“I feel great about winning it,” he says. “It helps your self-confidence. At first, I knew I could compete with these guys, but the idea of not getting a lot of practice made it challenging. I’m probably one of those guys who best represents what the Red Man (now BFL) trail stood for – I still work full time, I pay all my own entry fees and I make most of my own lures. Sometimes you wonder whether it’s worth it. But when you do well, it is worth it.”

While the standings title gives Dobransky an automatic berth into the 2002 Wal-Mart FLW Tour, he hasn’t decided yet whether he will fish it. Besides, he has more immediate fish to fry anyway. On Wednesday he begins competition at the 2001 EverStart Series Championship, which this year is being held at Alabama’s Pickwick Lake. As everyone knows, Pickwick Lake is known for one thing: big-time smallmouth bass fishing.

And that suits the 2001 Northern Division standings winner just fine.

Says Dobransky, “It’s hard to go to a place like Pickwick and fish for off-brand fish. But I plan on doing the same thing I’ve done all year long. My game plan is to target largemouth.”