Scott Martin says he has a certain comfort level fishing at Lake Eufaula that’s different from other fisheries and that made it easy for him to adjust from the shallow-water pattern he was in practice to the brush pile milk run he fished in the tournament.
The change of plans allowed him to hold down a Top-10 spot the first 2 days before fading to 11th on day 3 when his areas started to dry up. It’s his third straight Top-20 finish and has him 7th in Angler of the Year points with two tournaments to go.
“I feel comfortable there,” he said. “I decided with the water falling in practice, I probably needed to switch gears and look offshore and look for brush and those fish on drops.”
He targeted brush in the mouths of spawning pockets close to areas with shoreline grass that held fish in practice.
“The problem was I didn’t have enough of them,” he said. “Where guys like (Bryan) Thrift and (Troy) Morrow had hundreds, I had like 10. I had to milk them for all they were worth. It worked out good.
“I was able to catch a good number of fish on day 1 and a decent amount on day 2. Then the water started coming up Saturday and I think some of those fish may have gone back up to the grass.”
He knew other competitors – Jeff Gustafson and John Cox mainly – were having success catching fish shallow that weren’t oriented on brush, but he was reluctant to go all in on running the bank.
“I couldn’t get that going for whatever reason,” he said. “I kept finding myself out in the open water.”
Martin’s key bait was a 10-inch ribbon tail worm and another key tool for locating and effectively fishing the brush piles was Garmin’s new Panoptix forward-shooting sonar.
“I could idle around and find the brush piles in practice, but on game day, I could stop 100 feet short and ease in and then point my trolling motor at the brush and when I’d get about 70 feet away I’d see it appear on my screen,” he said. “I knew how long of a cast I had to make in that direction. I could also scan the trolling motor to the right or left and find littler pieces of structure that way.
“It allowed me to be very efficient and it eliminated a lot of the guesswork. If I were to make 1,000 casts at those brush piles, 990 of them would be right in the brush.”
The Big Bite Lookback, which focuses on the angler who's first out of the final cut at each tour-level event, is brought to you by the great folks at Big Bite Baits.
