Practice: Mike McCarthy Jr.  And I was fortunate enough to be able to get in a day and a half of practice for this event before the cut-off. In practice we were able to locate a couple of areas that had fish. Our goal was to try and find a couple of spots not too far from each other to rotate.  Knowing that the fishing would be tough no matter what, we tried to put together a pattern.  Not too long into our fishing we found an underwater pipe that gave up 9 keepers for about 14 to 15 lbs.  We were wacking fish around this stretch of bank left and right so we left the spot to do some more looking. We fished a lot of different areas and ran as far as we could go trying to sample lay downs, lily pads, the barges, and rip rap.  We didn’t want to look for spots too far away from the pipe.  After much searching we couldn’t find anything like the concentration around that pipe.  We ended up picking off one here and there but one thing was for sure the bass were in the current breaks where you had a certain flow of current.  We’d both caught a bunch of keepers and I caught one over 4lbs. After practice our game plan was to fish the pipe first thing out the gate and then run our pattern to fill out the limit if we couldn’t get it done on just the pipe alone.   We were worried that one of the Stren pros might find our spot and then we would just have to rely on our pattern that we knew was going to be a tedious affair.

Smack Tackle's Gizz series of crankbaits will catch you bass with just a straight retrieve however there are a couple of techniques and tips that I can give you to maximize the crankbaits potential and it's fish catching ability.

When it comes to catching bass all across the country you must be a versatile angler if you wish to compete at a high level. It is great to have a couple of baits that you feel very comfortable using, but you also have to branch out your fishing enough in order to sometimes put that extra fish in the boat. One of the biggest problems that a lot of anglers have, especially the college crowd, is that they are not versatile. If they don’t get to fish like they do on their home lake with their old standbys they seem completely lost or out of it. The bass are constantly changing throughout the course of the day and a lot of times you will need to apply a variety of techniques in order to keep up with them. It’s hard to become an expert on a technique over night but I do have some advice on what you can do to branch out more and start catching more fish.