When you find a hot spot on a trophy-bass lake that even the guides don't know about, you're really onto something. Terry Scroggins discovered just such a honey hole at Lake Fork last week, and he and his teammates exploited it en route to victory at the inaugural Toyota Texas Bass Classic (TTBC).
Scroggins, Chris Daves, Frank Ippoliti and James Niggemeyer caught 244-12 over 3 days to win the Professional Anglers Association-sanctioned event. The captain estimated that all but about 25 pounds of that total came from a single locale that he'd stumbled onto in practice.
They caught 119 pounds on the final day to claim the top spot and $250,000. They finished about 35 pounds ahead of Alton Jones' team, which had led the first 2 days.
Here's how they did it.
Practice
The 160 anglers who competed in the TTBC primarily practiced on their own, and then took what they'd learned into team meetings on the evening prior to day 1. The Scroggins team had one big advantage in that Niggemeyer, a Bassmaster Elite Series rookie, had guided on Fork for the past 6 years.
Scroggins was fishing with a non-competitor – Ashley Stanford of Alabama – when he discovered the place that held hundreds of fish in the 4-pound-or-better class.
"I was idling underneath the bridge in the back of Big Mustang, which (Texan and Fork expert) Kelly Jordon had told me was an awesome creek and would be a good place to start," he said. "There was so much timber that I was scared to run through there very fast, so I was idling along, and about 300 yards out I saw a single fish bust the surface."
He went over and investigated, and discovered an underwater point adjacent to a channel swing. His graph showed hundreds of fish along a 50-yard hump in about 12 feet of water.
He caught a 6-pounder on his first cast with a Bomber Fat Free Shad, and then caught a 4-pounder on his second cast. Stanford followed up by catching a 6 and a 4 on a single cast of a crankbait.
Shortly thereafter, Scroggins caught an 11-pound monster. That was about all he could take.
"I called James and had him come over, and I asked him if he knew any other places that looked like this. He said he knew a few, but in 6 years of guiding, he'd never seen a single boat on that spot."
Competition
> Day 1: 17, 68-12
> Day 2: 12, 57-00
> Day 3: 25, 119-00
> Total = 54, 244-12
Under the TTBC format, each team sent out two anglers in the same boat in the morning flight, with the other two fishing the afternoon flight for the first 2 days. The field was then reduced to the Top 5, and all 20 anglers fished both flights on day 3.
Scroggins and Daves comprised the team's morning duo, and they pulled 36-12 off the magic ledge on day 1. Ippoliti and Niggemeyer added another 32 pounds in the afternoon, which left the team in 3rd place – a little more than 13 pounds behind Jones' squad.
Scroggins' team moved up one spot in the standings on each successive day of the Toyota Texas Bass Classic.
A storm front that brought powerful winds had moved in the night before, and the fish had moved off the hump and down into the standing timber in the channel below.
"They'd suspended at about 14 feet in among the trees, which were in about 20 feet of water," Scroggins said. "We just had to cast and cast and cast and wait for a reaction bite."
After a night of severe thunderstroms, the wind switched directions to the north and blew even harder on day 2, and the ledge was dead during the first flight. Scroggins and Daves managed only three fish for 16-12.
"We started there and went back two other times, but we never got a bite. We got one about 8 pounds on a swimbait (from a another location), and then we picked up a couple off of beds.
"We went back and told the other guys that it looked like the spot had dried up."
Ippoliti and Niggemeyer tried the ledge first thing after lunch, but they didn't have any better luck than their predecessors. They went and fished other stuff for a couple of hours, then went back to the submerged point with 1 hour left in the day.
The ledge-fish were back to their former selves, and Ippoliti and Niggemeyer pounded them to the tune of 40-04 – the team's best session of the first 2 days. Their 57-00 total for the day moved them up one spot to 2nd, but they'd lost another pound to the Jones team and would enter the final day trailing by 15.
Since all four anglers would fish both flights on day 3, it was determined that Scroggins and Daves should camp out on the point, while Niggemeyer fell back on his guiding experience to find other fish for him and Ippoliti. The plan worked perfectly.
Scroggins and Daves caught a combined 92 pounds over the two sessions, and the Ippoliti-Niggemeyer boat contributed 27 pounds worth of bed-fish. Their 119-pound total for the day was more than 38 pounds better than that of any other team.
Pattern Notes
> The team used 3/4-ounce, deep-diving, shad-colored crankbaits to catch the ledge-fish. Included among those were the aforementioned Fat Free Shad, along with Bill Norman DD22s.
"Anything with chartreuse and white in it seemed to do it," Scroggins said. "One of the keys was making very long casts to get the bait down as deep as you could. The 7 1/2-foot Castaway Launcher rod was real critical for me."
> Niggemeyer caught an 8-pounder off a dock on day 3 using a 5-inch Strike King Zero.
> Scroggins caught his two bed-fish on day 2 on a Yum Craw Pappy.
Notable
> Scroggins and Niggemeyer had a long day on Monday. Both drove 14 hours to Georgia's Clarks Hill, site of this week's Elite Series event. When they arrived, they were scheduled to do an interview with CBS TV for the network's Mother's Day recap of the TTBC.
