David Walker hit just about every wave imaginable on his ride back to the launch ramp on day 2 of the Ross Barnett Reservoir Elite Series – and he loved every second of it.
After finding himself buried near the bottom of the leaderboard (91st) after the first day, he bounced back with an 18-05 limit on day 2 to catapult himself inside the top-51 cut in 36th place. He tacked on another 10-09 on Saturday and wound up 33rd, an impressive rally at a fishery that proved challenging on so many fronts.
His 58-place improvement also gained him 11 places in the Angler of the Year points race, where he now sits in 28th.
“I think there was a good bit of divine intervention in that one,” Walker quipped.
A four-fish bag for 7-02 on day 1 put him in a sour mood to start the event and that carried over to the first part of day 2.
“At noon, I hadn’t had a bite – not even a strike of any kind,” he said. “It was the day the wind showed up and at that point, I was like, ‘Screw this. I’m not running around in this. I’m going to fish what’s in front of me and make something out of it.’”
Except he couldn’t.
“Externally, you’re doing your job, but internally it’s a pressure cooker,” he said. “Your hat’s floating on top of your head and I had no confidence in anything.”
He continued to rotate through baits partly because “I didn’t want to make another empty cast,” he said. “Finally, around 1 o’clock, I rigged up a swimjig and Frankensteined some things together and said, ‘Hey, that looks good.’”
Within minutes, he caught a 5-pounder on it.
“It was a good combination of things – it was the biggest fish I’d caught all week and it was on a new bait I’d just put on,” he said. “I was like, ‘Dang, I’ve got something here.’ I felt like I had some traction. I couldn’t have been any lower, but that one cast changed my attitude. As soon as it did, within 15 minutes, I had caught a 5, a 4 and a 3 and went from the saddest angler on the planet to the happiest.”
With a couple hours left in the day, he began doing the math on what he figured he had and what it might take to make the cut. A little while later, a 4-pounder ate his swimjig to give him roughly 16 pounds for four fish.
With about 30 minutes left before check in, he moved to a patch of grass he’d seen earlier in the event.
“I fired one cast at it and caught a 2 1/2-pounder,” he said. “It was 2:56 p.m. and I was like, ‘Holy (cow). That just happened!’ I couldn’t believe all of that went together like it did. The more you fish the harder it is to believe those things will happen because they haven’t happened before. Experience tends to give you a narrower field of view.
“It was probably one of the best days I’ve had as a tournament guy because it was such a swing. I’ve had them where it goes the other way, too.”
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