Boater Chris Macy of Diamond, Mo. won the 37th annual BFLAll-American on South Carolina's Lake Hartwell Friday, bringing a five-bass limit to the scale weighing 13-01. Macy’s three-day total of 15 bass weighing 34-10 was enough to overtake 2nd-place angler Todd Goade of White Pine, Tenn. – who led the event after the second day of competition – by a 2-04 margin. For the win, Macy earned the top payout of $100,000.
“This is unbelievable – going in to today, I really didn’t think I had a shot at it,” said Macy, who qualified for the tournament through the Bass Fishing League Ozark Division. “I went out this morning and thought that if I could catch 10 pounds, I’d be happy. When you make it to the last day, you kind of look at the payscale and you know that every spot you can hold or move up is another thousand bucks in your pocket. My goal was just to hang in there.
“I stumbled on to something around 1 o’clock this afternoon, and it absolutely went crazy from there,” Macy continued. “On the LiveScope, I would watch my swimbait come across the brush piles and if I could get the fish to follow it, I would kill it and let that swimbait go straight to the bottom. Every one of those fish would nose down on it, and as soon as I popped that swimbait up off the bottom, they would eat it every time.”
Macy said that of the 15 keepers he brought to the weigh-in stage this week, 14 of them came on a Keitech 2.8-inch swimbait in Tennessee shad and sexy shad colors. He credited his electronics as being crucial to his win.
“Every fish that I caught came off of a brush pile,” Macy said. “My Garmin LiveScope was crucial. Every fish that I caught this week, I watched it bite. Most of the water I fished was 20 to 30 feet deep and if I could get the fish sitting up on top of the brush piles, it was game on.
“Overall, it has just been a super 3 days,” Macy went on to say. “I was just so happy to be fishing on the third day of the All-American, and I knew that if I could put a big one in the bag today that anything could happen. When it’s your time, it’s your time and today was just my day.”
Here are the final totals for the Top 10:
1. Chris Macy: 34-10
2. Todd Goade: 31-11
3. Cole Floyd: 31-11
4. Jayme Rampey: 31-07
5. Bryan Dowdy: 30-07
6. Roger Fitzpatrick: 28-01
7. Randall Allen: 27-11
8. Kip Carter: 27-11
9. Dustin Lippe: 25-11
10. Dennis Berhorst: 23-11
