Jay Yelas – Practice
Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Practice has been a lot of fun. I'm catching a lot of fish, but it seems the bigger fish are a little harder to find. The water's real high – higher than I've ever seen it here in the fall. It's got the fish scattered. The largemouths are biting real good, but like I said, they're scattered. There's just acres and acres of flooded grass, reeds, pads and all that stuff.

The smallmouths don't seem to be biting as good as normal. I think the higher water moved some of the smallmouths up shallow, so they're scattered around too. I'm catching just as much fish as I ever have, but I'm having a hard time pinpointing the schools of big ones. I found only one good spot that had a few good ones in a small, concentrated area, but other than that, I've had to wade through a lot of small fish.
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I'll be fishing for green ones like I usually do up here, but I'll fish for shallow smallies a little bit too.

I think the conditions are great because it totally shuffles the deck. We've never seen the lake under these conditions and I really enjoy when we have tournament like this, instead of going and fishing the same rockpiles and holes that you always do every year.