Jay Yelas – Practice Summary
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
On a lake like Beaver, a 10- to 20-mph wind is nothing. It actually helps the fishing. Here, the lake goes east to west so a north or northwest wind comes down the lake and comes into the current. It makes for a rough boat ride and also the stuff offshore will be tough to fish with the wind blowing. That could hurt the weights. This will be an in-between tournament. It’s what you expect for the first week of May. It wasn’t an unusually warm spring. April was a cool month for the South and that slowed things down a bit.
It’s an interesting setup for a tournament with the cooler weather combined with water fluctuation issues. You can’t see the fish here so you don’t know if they’re on beds. There are some fish on ledges and you can catch them and do decent with that. There are a lot of fish on the bank, but they’re more focused on the shad than around bedding areas.
I had a slow second day and a good third day so I’m going to fish the lower end and catch a mixed bag of smallmouth and largemouth. It’s definitely not wide open. Guys are griping that it could take more to cash a check at Beaver than it would here. I laughed at that.
Jay Yelas – Day 1 Practice
Sunday, May 1, 2016
Today, the lake was 6 inches below pool so there was not much on the bank to fish. I’m sure I was like a lot of guys trying to get that to work, but I wasn’t able to get that to work. I found the bite to be kind of slow. I caught four that were 3 pounds or over and one close to 5. I think I only had five keeper bites all day. It wasn’t a good start. I think I’m going to look at Wilson Lake tomorrow.
Pickwick has changed. It has a ton of grass in it now. There’s hydrilla above the Natchez Trace bridge. It’s never had it up there. I went about halfway down the lake today and didn’t go to the lower end. I plan to look there on Tuesday. Today, in talking to some guys, they were catching fish, but it wasn’t on fire, but that’s how it was at Wheeler (for the Elite Series). On the Tennessee River, it’s all about finding that magic spot where they get wadded up. These fish are in transition now, but the water’s so dirty that if they’re on beds you wouldn’t be able to see them. I don’t know what stage they’re in, but I didn’t see any fry. I’m just guessing that they’re mostly done spawning.
