Official practice for the Forrest Wood Cup starts today at Lake Ouachita near Hot Springs, Ark. and the host-city name couldn't be more appropriate. The field launches under dangerous, Lake Mead-grade heat with actual highs above 100.
That's the bad news. The good news is today marks the beginning of a general cooling trend and temperatures should be somewhere in the low-90s for day 1 of competition on Thursday. That's the norm for a summer championship.
As far as the bite itself, there's a lot of pre-tournament scuttlebutt about the potential for a bream-bed bite, about the potential for a deep-tree bite, about a grass bite, a brush bite and more.
There's also the fact that Scott Suggs
isn't fishing the Cup. He was the hometown hero when he won the Cup at Ouachita in 2007, and he finished 2nd at last year's Ouachita FLW Tour. Suggs used deep fish to win in 2007 – fish that other competitors would have struggled to catch. Electronics have come a long way since then, but Suggs' absence nonetheless removes one immediate obstacle in front of competitors.
Each of the Cup competitors has 3 days – today, tomorrow and Tuesday – to dial in a gameplan. The field then rests on Wednesday and competition begins Thursday.
Prior to today's launch, BassFan spoke with three of the competitors about their practice strategies.
Rose: Assess the 'Feel'
Mark Rose, fresh off a win at Pickwick and ranked 3rd in the world, has had mixed results at Ouachita. His best finishes come in spring events. During the summer, he finished a fairly miserable 48th at the '07 Cup.
So Rose's immediate practice goal, he said, is to simply get a feel for what's happening right now in the lake and judge what depth he'll ultimately target.
In his words: "I need to see whether the bedding bluegill are a factor – if there's fish shallow – and I have to find where the thermocline is, because the fish will have to stay where they have the most oxygen and bait activity."
About the potential for a deep bite, he's a little concerned about the sheer amount of timber out there. It's not like ledge-fishing – a pattern he's pretty much mastered over the past few years. Instead, it's like "finding a needle in a haystack," he said, and noted that a lot of times the fish are "kind of uncatchable out there."
"The fish that can be caught – that's where I'm going to try to spend most of my efforts," he added. "I just need to know if they'll be up there around those bluegill beds, or if they're in brushpiles or grass. It seems to me that one of those three things is going to happen – bluegill beds, brush or grass – so I'll just do my best in evaluating all three of those.
"And if there's a wildcard, I'll try to find it."
Interestingly, he lamented the absence of Suggs in the field, based on the reasoning that he wants to fish against, and beat the best. "If you're fishing the Bassmaster Classic, you want VanDam fishing there. And at Ouachita, you always want the best of the best competing against you."
Kenney: Hunting Green
JT Kenney could probably find a lone blade of a grass in a vast, rocky desert. He loves green stuff and he's stoked that a few friends told him there's a little more grass this year in Ouachita.
He's certainly not banking on that, but it's where he'll start his practice.
Ouachita, an Ozarks highland reservoir, offers countless cuts and bluffs and overwhelming volumes of deep, standing timber.
"They didn't say there was a lot more grass, but they said what was here looked pretty decent," Kenney said. "It's been ridiculously hot, and when it gets hot like this, oxygen is a big factor. A lot of times the oxygen in the shallows will overcome the temperature and the fish will be there. And obviously grass produces oxygen, so I'd think the grass bite could be pretty good."
Kenney was first out of the Top-10 cut at the '07 Cup, and he made the Top 10 a few years before that when the Cup was at nearby Hamilton. Hamilton was a schooling bite, he noted, and there were shallow fish at Ouachita in '07, but he still plans to check out the deep bite this year. He'll be more comfortable out deep this time, though, because of his Lowrance StructureScan electronics.
"I'm kind of looking forward to playing with that in the trees. With StructureScan, you can idle through trees and say, 'Oh, there's a big school of them.' You don't have to have the Scott Suggs knowledge of where they school in fall to know where they are in summertime. Now you can just idle through and see them. And you might need to sit and screw with them, but I don't think they're uncatchable."
In summary, Kenney sees three potentials as practice begins – the grass bite, the bream-bed bite and the deep-timber bite. So he's not going to try to reinvent the wheel. "I'm just going to stick with those three things and not waste time trying to find something stupid and off-the-wall."
Dudley: Looking Deep
David Dudley, a former Cup (FLW Tour Championship) winner, comes to Ouachita with the 2011 FLW Tour Angler of the Year trophy in hand.
Most interesting about Dudley's strategy is he pre-practiced heavily and is pretty convinced the event will be won or lost out deep. Everyone should be able to catch shallow fish, but the competitor who can do both will prevail, he thinks.
He's of course aware of the bream-bed bite – he and his running mate Jacob Powroznik both rode it to Top-6 finishes at last year's Tour event. But by Dudley's reasoning, it's a bite that's going away and the bream-fish will be split among several competitors.
"That's why I think you'll need to fish both deep and shallow," Dudley said. "The bream-bed bite's a dying pattern, I think, so it's not the type of thing that'll replenish. The guy who does that will have to have something else deep to back it up and carry him through.
"I had a really good pre-practice out deep," he said, in response to a question of whether the deep fish are "catchable."
"I caught one every place I stopped. So anyone who says they're uncatchable – that statement shocks me.
"I'll tell you this: You're going to see Ouachita pump out some fish. I may be way off base, but I bet the first day 15 pounds won't even get you in the Top 10. The last day of (pre-)practice I could have had 20 pounds in the blink of an eye. Everybody I talked to had 12 or 13 at least. This lake's got 'em and it's not going to be a low-weight tournament."
Notable
> The '07 Cup was a low-weight tournament and winner Suggs weighed just 6 pounds on the final day.
> Thanks to Fishing Hot Spots for the digital map of Lake Ouachita. Fishing Hot Spots maps help you learn tips and techniques, find structure and get the edge you need to be successful. Buy your Fishing Hot Spots map of Ouachita, or maps of many other tournament waters, at FishingHotSpots.com or your local retailer.
