Brian Latimer wasn't entirely disappointed with his day-1 showing at last week's Beaver Lake FLW Tour, even though his 8-15 sack left him mired in 99th place.
"On paper it looks horrible, but I actually had a decent first day," said the rookie from South Carolina. "You've got that 15-inch slot (for largemouths and smallmouths), so I was throwing back some pretty good fish that weren't quite keepers, and I lost one that kept me from having 11 1/2 or 12 pounds.
"You can throw back 10 or 11 pounds there without having a keeper to weigh."
He caught some good ones that he could take to the scale on day 2, however. His 15-15 bag moved him up to 33rd place and earned him his second straight $10,000 check after he opened the season with a bomb at Lake Okeechobee. He's moved up to 45th on the points list – squarely in contention to qualify for the Forrest Wood Cup.
"I fished the same pattern and some of the same spots on the second day, but I made the effort to get up the (White) River about 2 hours earlier," he said. "I'd been trying to catch a limit of (spotted bass) close to the ramp before I went and it actually worked the first day – I had one decent one that made up most of my weight and I lost one that was close to 4 pounds.
"I went to the place where I lost the 4-pounder and I caught two 3s on back-to-back flips, and then for about an hour there I just kept culling my way up to almost 16 pounds. Losing that good one had shown me that the right kind of fish were in that area and everything just lined up. The water was warming and it was sending me more fish literally by the hour. I really wanted to fish that third day real bad."
He flipped a Z-Man Turbo CrawZ in the bama bug color. He picked up one good fish on a frog from the back of a pocket.
"In practice there were no fish in the backs, but as the water warmed they literally moved in overnight. I was just flipping laydowns and (also) hopping the bait down the rock ledges on the little secondary bluffs inside the pockets."
The Sunline Strong Performer, which focuses on 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.
