By Todd Ceisner
BassFan Editor
The streak is over.
Ray Hanselman’s bid to win a fifth straight FLW Series tournament ended with a 16th-place finish at the Sam Rayburn Reservoir Southwestern season opener last weekend. Most anglers would be happy with a Top-20 finish in a 202-boat field, but Hanselman’s quest to make more history was done in by a flu bug during practice that kept him off the water for 2 1/2 days and poor execution on day 1.
“I felt like I had a decent chance to win,” he said. “It was the right time of year. I’m not mad, but it was a missed opportunity. I should’ve made a Top 10. I was close, just about a pound out. I guess not fishing clean was my demise.”
Hanselman had placed in the Top 10 in the last three FLW Series events at Rayburn, including a win last year during his historic sweep of the then-Texas Division and FLW Series Championship. Last week, it just wasn’t meant to be.
“I got some kind of flu bug a couple days before I left,” he said. “One of my kids had it so I knew I’d get it. I had a fever the first couple days of practice and it was rainy and windy. I didn’t get much practice in.
“We had a big low-pressure front come in and everybody was catching them in practice. I’d rather it be tough than easy because the guys that tend to do better always do better when it’s tough and it was setting up that way.”
He lost two key fish on day 1 that hung him up in some trees and wound up with 16-05. He rebounded with 18-11 on day 2 to move up the leaderboard.
“I just ran out of water,” he said. “I didn’t have the extended practice I needed. In a multi-day event, you need to be able to go to fish that are biting. The water was warming up and the fish were acting like, ‘Hey, it’s late February. We’re not supposed to be up here.’ If it had stayed low pressure, there would’ve been some unbelievable weights because those open-water fish were biting like crazy.”
Below is a Q&A with Hanselman about how he tackled Rayburn:
BassFan: Did you feel any additional pressure entering this event after the season you had last year?
Hanselman: “I talked to (tournament director Ron Lappin before the tournament and he asked me same the thing. It was odd. There’s typically the normal tournament pressure and wanting to have a decent showing. I had that on top of doing what I did last year. Now, I’m like, ‘I don’t want to fall on my face.’ Once I got on the water, I got that out of my system and I could just go fishing. It’s a whole new year and all I want to do is be consistent. Last year, the stars aligned and everything worked out. If you put yourself in that position, you’re going to win one every now and then.”
BF: Did last year’s victory at Rayburn or any of your history there affect your strategy last week?
RH: “Yeah it did. It was pretty close to same time of year as last year’s tournament. I’ve been fishing the same four areas on Rayburn for 25 years now and I’m basically chasing the same genetic ancestry line of fish. I know where the fish in those areas are going to be and if you were to put a dam across that cove, it makes it a 50-acre lake and that’s how I break it down. I just stayed in those areas.”
BF: What was your confidence level like after practice?
RH: “I felt like I had a decent chance to the make the cut. I wasn’t sure, though, because I didn’t practice the 2 days while the front was coming in. Those easy fish that were out in the open water over grass flaked out and disappeared. The ones that were in the hay grass just got in there deeper.”
BF: Where and how did you fish and why?
RH: “I’d found two schools of good fish holding over hydrilla in 4 to 6 feet. It wasn’t real thick, but I caught some like that in the tournament. A bunch of them moved so I switched gears and got in that thicker cover because I knew those fish would stay in there. It wasn’t like it was lake-wide. It was different coves where they were moving in or moving out. You had to find and cover a lot of water to find fish doing the same thing.”
BF: What did you throw and why?
RH: “I stuck with mainly a 1- to 1 1/4-ounce Strike King Slither Rig (Okeechobee craw with a junebug Strike King Rage Craw trailer) in the hay grass. It took everything I had to get them out. I caught a few on a swimjig, but all of the big fish were caught flipping.”
BF: Any adjustments you wish you’d made?
RH: “On day 2, I spent some time trying to find some deeper fish. If I’d have not done that, I probably could’ve culled a couple more times flipping. On day 1, I had enough bites, but I wasn’t in tournament form.”
