By John Johnson
BassFan Senior Editor

Watching a lot of Bassmaster LIVE coverage of Elite Series tournaments over the past several years gave Bill Perkins the notion that his angling skill set might be a bit better than he'd previously thought. His debut at the Opens level pretty much bore that out.

Perkins, a 39-year-old insurance agent from Rochester, N.Y., posted a wire-to-wire victory in his Opens debut recently at Oneida Lake in his home state. He compiled a 52-03 total over three days and prevailed by a margin of a little more than 2 pounds over runner-up A.J. Slegona.

"I'm a huge ban of B.A.S.S. and the Elite Series – I'm probably way too into it. Watching guys on the boat, I realized they weren't really doing anything special," Perkins said of his impressions from the LIVE broadcasts. "It's not like other sports, where they guys you're watching can run a lot faster or jump a lot higher or whatever.

"I felt like if I got around the right fish, I could do well in one of those derbies."

Came Off a Near-Miss

Perkins and his brother Jacob, his team-tournament partner on the Empire Bass Trail, nearly won a single-day event at Oneida the previous weekend. They were edged out by a hundredth of a pound.

"We had 19.32 and a team beat us with 19.33," he said. "There was nothing we could do but congratulate those guys. I'd lost one big fish, but we went in hoping for 18 pounds, so we couldn't complain."

He nearly matched that weight on day 1 of the Open, bringing 18-11 to the scale. His succeeding bags registered 17-00 and 16-08.

All 15 of the fish he took to the scale were smallmouths. He had three in the 4 1/2-pound class over the course of the event, with most in the 3 1/2- to 3 3/4-pound range.

He said the key to his victory was finding offshore rock with his Humminbird electronics and fishing painstakingly slow.

"I had about half a dozen spots that I thought (he'd have to himself), but by the end only a couple of those remained," he said. "I fished a pretty big community-hole area that had some adjacent spots I could sneak out to. If I pulled up and the timing was right, I'd catch one or two."

He employed dropshot and Ned rigs on the first two days, which featured stiff winds. The fish seemed to wise up to those presentations during the much-calmer final round, so he switched to a spider grub on a football-head jig.

"It was a lot calmer that day and I'd been mining those areas hard," he said. "They'd seen that stuff a million times and that gig was up."

He was back selling insurance two days after the event concluded. Because he won't compete in all three events in the division, he can't claim the Bassmaster Classic berth that accompanies an Open win.

He may try to fish the full schedule in 2022 and eventually work his way to B.A.S.S.' top level. For now, he'll enjoy his accomplishment.

"I got into this hoping to win one of those trophies," he said. "I thought it would take a long time."

Gear Notes

Perkins' dropshot bait was a 2.8-inch Keitech Easy Shiner over a 1/4-ounce tungsten weight. For his Ned rig, he employed a 1/6-ounce Z-man Finess Ned Head with a Z-Man TRD (goby Bryant). His line was 10-pound Seaguar Smackdown braid with a long (20- to 30-foot) Seaguar InvizX fluorocarbon. The long leader allowed him to re-tie his terminal tackle frequently.

For the final round, he fished a Keitech Spider Grub (green pumpkin) on a 1/2-ounce Keitech tungsten football-head jig on baitcasting gear.

He used iRod rods and Shimano reels.