Jay Yelas – Practice
Tuesday, March 2, 2010

BassFan
Photo: BassFan

The lake's awfully tough right now. This is the earliest we've ever been here for a tournament and it's cold. The water's in the low- to mid-40s and it's winter-pattern fishing. The fish aren't moving around at all like last year when we fished here. Last time, you could go anywhere in the lake and catch fish. Not so this year. So it'll be a lot tougher tournament.

There'll be a few good stringers caught. The lake's fishing pretty small it seems to me. We won't have quite the weights we saw last year, when 50th place the first day was about 15 pounds. Not even close, I don't think.

This lake is absolutely full of fish, so you can catch fish, but again, not like last year. It's a little behind because of the water temperature, and it's the clearest I've ever seen it. It's maybe the only time I've been here in March and not seen any mud anywhere in the lake. There hasn't been much rain, and this lake always fishes better when there's runoff and some dirty water. It's easier to catch the largemouths when it's like that. Usually the James or other major tributaries have some color, but there's just lots of clear water.

I'm going to fish shallow in this tournament. I tried both, but maybe I didn't fish deep enough. There are some fish up shallow to be had, so that's where I'm going to fish.