Hackney Was On Better Quality Than Anyone Else

By John Johnson
BassFan Senior Editor

It was highly unlikely that the winner of the Cayuga Lake Bassmaster Elite Series would bring fewer than 20 fish to the scale over the 4 days of the event. Then again, it was doubtful that anybody would catch 19 that averaged nearly 4 1/2 pounds each from a northern venue with an abbreviated growing season.

For Greg Hackney, the final regular-season event was all about opting for quality over quantity. He didn't get anywhere near the number of bites that some of his competitors racked up, but he also wasn't inconvenienced by the need to unhook short bass or pickerel numerous times a day.

The 19 largemouths he brought to the scale combined to weigh a whopping 85 pounds. That was more than 9 pounds north of what anybody else managed on 20 fish.

The Louisiana resident took command of the derby on day 2 with a 23-pound stringer and emphatically closed out the victory with a haul that was just shy of 24. His second tour-level triumph of the year (he also won the Pickwick Lake FLW Tour) stretched his lead in the Angler of the Year race from 1 point to 15.

It was his first Elite victory since the circuit's inaugural campaign in 2006, when he topped the field at Sam Rayburn Reservoir in Texas.

Here are some of the particulars.

Practice

Cayuga was a new venue for the majority of the 106-angler field, but it was known from the get-go that the lake's shallower northern end was where the majority of the competitors would congregate. Hackney's plan was to avoid the "community holes" if that was even remotely feasible.

"I hadn't totally written it off, but it would've been a last-resort deal to fish up there," he said. "A big factor in all of that was talking with Stephen Browning – he'd been there for the (Bassmaster Northern) Open a couple years ago.

"He talks freely with me and I quizzed him a bunch about how it set up and whether a guy had to fish up north to have a shot at winning, and he didn't think so."

He began his exploration of the lake all the way at the southern end near Ithaca, N.Y. and worked his way back. He ventured onto the giant north-end flat that was getting the most attention on the afternoon of the second practice day.

"Nothing made me want to stay there. It was getting so much pressure and there was even a lot of locals in there. Everybody seemed to be just sitting around looking at everybody else."

He'd found the place that would become his key morning stop the previous day – he'd hooked a good specimen and watched half a dozen more come with it as he reeled it up. It was a narrow stretch – perhaps 50 yards long and 30 yards wide – between two grass flats where water that was as deep as 17 feet deep got relatively close to the bank.

There were milfoil patches on both ends and a sparse line of a different type of vegetation (possibly American pondweed) on the outside edge.

"I just started there the first morning of the tournament and I figured that with that many fish there, somebody else would've found it, too. The funny thing was that nobody ever tried to get on it the whole tournament.

"Sometimes there'd be boats close by, but they were all on the docks. Everybody else was fishing a lot shallower."

Competition

> Day 1: 5, 20-05
> Day 2: 5, 23-01
> Day 3: 4, 17-11
> Day 4: 5, 23-15
> Total = 19, 85-00

Hackney opened with a sack that left him just 5 ounces off Brandon Palaniuk's lead. In an assessment that might've been ominous for the rest of the field, he didn't feel like he'd had all that great of a day, mentioning how his fish seemed to "bite funny" under the rainy conditions.

In reality, he hadn't known prior to that day the type of quality that was in his key area. His standard program is to fish very aggressively on the opening morning of an event and when that produced a high-teens stringer within the first couple hours, he stuck with his big jig for the duration of the derby and kept finding new backup places to throw it.

He catapulted into the lead on day 2 with the second-best bag of the tournament, which was topped only by his own final-day haul. He landed every bite he got and weighed a sack of 4 3/4-pound clones to take a 3-plus-pound advantage over 2nd-place Todd Faircloth.

Day 3 featured a strong wind out of the south that drove 3-foot rollers over his grass. He caught the four fish he weighed before the wind peaked and said he should have departed once it did, but hung around assuming he could entice one more.

When that didn't happen, his lead over Faircloth was reduced to just 10 ounces with 1 day to fish. He settled matters early on the final morning, though, putting more than 20 pounds in his livewell before 8:30.

Pattern Notes

Hackney is known primarily as a shallow-water stud, but he's well-versed in plying deep grass and relishes his opportunities to do it. He'd gone to Cayuga planning to pound the skinny water, but that notion was dispelled when he found the deep-grass fish on the initial practice day and then caught them on day 1 of competition.

"I thought going in that I was going to catch most of my fish in 5 feet of water or less," he said. "I had no idea that I'd end up completely washing that deal and catching them all from 14 feet or deeper.

"My secondary deal ended up being my primary deal and I just kept expanding on it. Every morning except the third day I caught enough to where I could go looking for new places and I found several. None were as good (as his primary area), but I caught key fish that I weighed in from all of them."

The fish at his main locale were always were always within a 20-yard span, but he had to pinpoint them much more precisely in order to fully exploit them.

"Every day they were kind of on a different place and those were basically breaks in the grass – it wasn't just a solid line of it out there. By the second day I figured out that I had to seine that stretch to determine where they were and then make that exact same flip over and over.

"One morning I caught two fish on the inside of the grass that were in 12 or 13 feet, but most of the time they were right on the outside edge."

Winning Gear Notes

> Flipping gear: 7'11" heavy-action Quantum Tour Hackney flipping stick, Quantum EXO PT 100 casting reel (6.6:1 ratio), 50-pound Gamma braided line, 1- or 1 1/4-ounce Strike King Hack Attack jig (blue craw), Strike King Rage Craw trailer (blue sapphire).

> The lone weigh-in fish that he didn't catch flipping the jig was a 5-pounder enticed by a Strike King Shim E Stick.

The Bottom Line

> Main factor in his success – "It'd have to be keeping an open mind because I really thought I was going to fish shallow."

> Performance edge – "Without a doubt by Lowrance electronics for allowing me to follow that deep outside (grass) edge. Most of the time I couldn't see the grass visually."

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