While many anglers opted to fish off-shore structure in the cleaner water on the lower end of Lake Eufaula, Darrell Davis was among the group that opted to go the other direction and tap into a flipping bite up the Chattahoochee River.
“I found a pattern at the start of practice in real shallow water where the bream were bedding,” Davis said. “The bigger fish would come in there first thing in the morning and feed and then again in the middle of the day.
“I ran way up the river on the second day of practice and got a lot of flipping bites and quite a few were good ones.”
That’s where he started the tournament, but the bigger bites eluded him as he caught 9-03 and stood in 82nd place after day 1.
“I had a lot of bites and that’s what kept me there, but I never got a good bite,” he added. “A lot of guys went farther up river that I did.”
He went back on day 2 and bagged 19-01, the only 19-pound stringer on Friday, to shoot up to 17th place and make the Top-20 cut.
“I could’ve had a monster bag, but I had an 8-pounder come off around 2 o’clock that would’ve been about a 7-pound upgrade,” he said.
He caught another 13-04 on Saturday to finish 13th – an improvement of 69 spots overall – and move into the Top 10 in AOY points.
He was keying on pad fields and shallow grass flats in 2 feet of water or less within 2 to 3 miles of takeoff. His main presentations were a topwater popping frog along with a swim jig paired with a soft-plastic toad imitation trailer.
“I’d fisd the frog extremely slow,” he said. “One cast would be a 4- to 5-minute ordeal. When we’d get a little breeze, I’d go with the swim jig.”
The Sunline Strong Performer, which focuses ons the angler who makes the most significant single-day move in the standings at each tour-level event, is brought to you by the great people at Sunline.
