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Thursday, November 21, 2019
Scott Martin Moves to BASS Opens for 2020!
Wednesday, November 20, 2019
2020 FLW Pro Circuit Schedule
Fishing
League Worldwide (FLW), announced the full details, including rules,
entry dates, schedules and the location for the 2020 Championship. The circuit
will feature a field of 150 pro anglers competing across seven regular-season
tournaments, which culminate to the FLW TITLE. A new event, the TITLE will
showcase the top 50 pros from the FLW Pro Circuit regular season as they
compete for an $820,000 purse.
The
seven regular-season events will operate under a four-day, five-bass limit
format with a full field of 150 anglers competing on days one and two. The
field will cut to the top 30 on day three, and then the top 10 will advance to
the championship round on day four. In the FLW TITLE, anglers will compete
using the Major League Fishing catch, weigh, and instantly release format. The
TITLE field will divide into two groups of 25 (Group A and B) whereas Group A
competes on days one and three and Group B competes on days two and four. Based
on the cumulative two-day weight total, the top ten from each Group (field of
20) will advance to day five. The top 10 pros after day five will advance to
the sixth and final day of competition for the opportunity to become the
inaugural FLW TITLE Champion with a top prize of $200,000.
2020 FLW PRO CIRCUIT SCHEDULE
Jan.
23-26 – Sam Rayburn Reservoir – Brookeland, Texas
Hosted
by the Jasper County Development District
Feb.
20-23 – Harris Chain of Lakes – Leesburg, Fla.
Hosted
by Lake County, Fla.
March
19-22 – Lake Martin – Alexander City, Ala.
Hosted
by the Alexander City Chamber of Commerce
April
2-5 – Cherokee Lake – Jefferson City, Tenn.
Hosted
by the Jefferson County Chamber of Commerce
April
23-26 – Lake Hartwell – Anderson, S.C.
Hosted
by Visit Anderson
May
14-17 – Lake Dardanelle – Russellville, Ark.
Hosted
by the Russellville Advertising & Promotion Commission
June
27-30* – Detroit River – Trenton, Mich.
Hosted
by the Detroit Sports Commission
*Saturday-Tuesday
event
2020 FLW TITLE CHAMPIONSHIP
Aug.
8-13 – St. Lawrence River – Massena, N.Y.
Hosted
by the Town of Massena
2020 FLW PRO CIRCUIT PAYOUTS
Place
– Payout
1
– $100,000
2
– $30,000
3
– $25,000
4
– $20,000
5
– $19,000
6
– $18,000
7
– $17,000
8
– $16,000
9
– $15,000
10
– $14,000
11-20
– $11,000
21-30
– $10,500
31-50
– $10,000
51-60
– $5,500
61-75
– $5,000
Big
Bass (days one and two) – $500
2020 FLW TITLE PAYOUTS
Place
– Payout
1
– $200,000
2
– $50,000
3
– $30,000
4
– $25,000
5
– $19,000
6
– $18,000
7
– $17,000
8
– $16,000
9
– $15,000
10
– $14,000
11-20
– $11,000
21-30
– $10,500
31-50
– $10,000
Big
Bass (days one and two) – $500
Monday, November 18, 2019
B.A.S.S. announces new national tournament series for kayak anglers
The popularity of kayak fishing is at an all-time high, just one of the reasons B.A.S.S., the world’s largest fishing organization, has formed a new tournament trail aimed specifically at kayaking enthusiasts.
Today, B.A.S.S. officials announced the schedule for the inaugural Huk Bassmaster B.A.S.S. Nation Kayak Series powered by TourneyX presented by Abu Garcia. The trail will feature five regular-season events in 2020 on well-known bass fisheries across the country with a championship to be held in conjunction with the 2021 Academy Outdoors + Sports Bassmaster Classic presented by Huk.
“You don’t have to look very hard these days to find a kayak in the bed of a truck or strapped to the roof of a SUV,” said Bruce Akin, CEO of B.A.S.S. “People are bass fishing from kayaks all over the world — and they’re doing it everywhere from big lakes and rivers to small creeks and ponds.
“With this new trail, we wanted to give those anglers an opportunity to show what they can do from a small craft.”
The inaugural tournament will be held in conjunction with the 50th edition of the Bassmaster Classic on Logan Martin Lake in Pell City, Ala., on March 5. Classic competition kicks-off on nearby Lake Guntersville the next morning. Other events will be held on Lake Fork in Lake Fork Marina, Texas (March 14), Chickamauga Lake in Dayton, Tenn. (May 23), the Mississippi River in La Crosse, Wis. (Aug. 15) and Clear Lake in Lakeport, Calif. (Aug. 29).
Entry fees for all of the events will be $250, and each will pay 30 places. Based on a full field of 150 kayaks, the total purse for each event will be $30,000.
“Huk is proud to work with B.A.S.S. on this exciting new tournament series designed to push the limits of kayak fishing,” said Melinda Hays, Freshwater Community Manager for Huk. “Bass fishing is an integral part of our DNA here at Huk and we endeavor to inspire anglers to explore their home waters by kayak.”
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Hollen Wins 2019 BASS National Championship on Lake Hartwell
By Andrew Canulatte
BASS PRESS RELEASE
Cody
Hollen had a feeling that his favorite lipless crankbait would be a
difference-maker during Friday’s final round of the TNT
Fireworks B.A.S.S. Nation Championship.
Boy, was he ever right.
The 35-year old angler from Beaverton, Ore., caught the heaviest
bag of the tournament — a five-bass limit that weighed 13 pounds, 12 ounces —
to vault from 10th place to the tournament title here on Lake Hartwell in the
northwest corner of the Palmetto State.
Hollen finished with a three-day total of 32-12, and he reaped a
wealth of spoils with the victory. Not only did he grab a berth in the 2020 Academy
Sports + Outdoors Bassmaster Classic presented by Huk, he also won a
Skeeter/Yamaha cash award of $20,000, an invitation to fish the 2020 Bassmaster
Elite Series and paid entry into the 2020 Basspro.com
Bassmaster Opens division of his choice.
He was one of 59 boaters and 115 total anglers who qualified for
the championship at Hartwell. Competitors hailed from 47 states and 11 foreign
countries, and they competed for a total of $140,300 in prize money this week.
Hollen made the final push to jump ahead of all of them, and it
was his decision to fish exclusively with a Yo-Zuri lipless crankbait in the
chrome with a blue back color that paid dividends, he said. He tried other
lures earlier in the tournament, but he eventually decided to forego variety
for what was working best.
“I had confidence coming into today,” Hollen said. “I had five
or six cane piles way down lake where the water was cleaner than it was up
here. They were in those cane piles. I was setting myself up maybe 30 yards
back of them and casting into them.
“The bait would hit the cane pile and the fish would hit it
hard.”
Hollen was in 19th place after Day 1 with a limit that weighed 9-2, and he
followed with a 9-14 limit on Day 2 to make the cut. He entered the final day
in 10th place, but he trailed leader Justy Varkevisser of South Africa by only
3-5.
Monday, November 11, 2019
Friday, November 8, 2019
Winter Bassin' Bait: The bucktail jig
Wednesday, November 6, 2019
Monday, November 4, 2019
Andrew Upshaw Wins 2019 Costa FLW Series Championship on Lake Cumberland!
2nd Cumberland win for
Upshaw in 2019
by Curtis
Niedermier
FLW PRESS
RELEASE
He did it again.
 |
| Fog delay and bluff walls key to win for Upshaw. (Photo: FLW) |
For
the second time this season, Andrew Upshaw is an FLW champion thanks to
consistent days spent targeting big Southern smallmouths. The Tulsa, Okla., pro
won the 2019 Costa FLW Series Championship on Lake Cumberland in Burnside, Ky.,
with a three-day total weight of 42 pounds, 15 ounces. The win comes less than
seven months after Upshaw won the FLW Tour event on Cherokee Lake in east
Tennessee.
“I’m
just going to call it blind luck,” says Upshaw about his recent string of
success on smallmouth fisheries. “And I’m glad to have it, to be honest with
you.”
Upshaw
calls it luck, but his recent performances say otherwise. He’s actually a
smallmouth fanatic, and it showed this week.
“For
the duration of my Tour career, we’ve fished enough smallmouth fisheries that
I’ve kind of learned how they set up and stuff like that,” he says. “The other
thing is, one of my favorite places to fish in the country is Lake St. Clair
and Lake Erie. I really love catching smallmouth up there. Now, they set up
totally different up there, but that love for smallmouth drives me to learn how
to catch them in other places.”
Like
up north, the smallmouths down here are aggressive fish. Upshaw had that in
mind as he formulated a game plan. He knew that if he was going to win with
smallmouths, he needed to find a pattern that would get him a lot of bites.
Cumberland is full of fish, so if he wasn’t getting bit consistently, he wasn’t
on a program that could win.
He eventually found the right
stuff down on the reservoir’s lower end.
“What
I figured out was main-lake transition bluffs, but it had to have the river
channel swing on it – true river-channel swings,” Upshaw says.
The
best transitions started at 45 to 50 feet deep adjacent to the wall and
shallowed up to 22 to 24 feet deep.
“Right
where it started slightly flattening out, that’s where they’d be sitting,”
Upshaw says. “I had about 15 spots, from about Conley Bottom down. Some of them
didn’t ever fire like they did in practice, and some did better than they did
in practice.”
Upshaw
figures a lot of these fish are already in or near their wintertime holes. Some
might eventually shift over to the deeper water near the bluffs, but others
will stay put. More fish were transitioning into these areas during the
tournament, which meant he had new bass coming to him. He was on so many fish
that, yesterday, Upshaw actually left them biting after multiple culls for
ounces. He was consistently on more fish than his fellow competitors, and by
getting more bites, he eventually was able to assemble limits of the quality
fish needed to win.
Friday, November 1, 2019
2019 Costa FLW Series Championship on Lake Cumberland Day 1: Roger Cousens Slams 17-02lbs of Smallmouth!
Smallmouth rule on Cumberland
by Curtis Niedermier
FLW PRESS RELEASE
 |
| Zimbabwe locks up lead with 17-02lbs of smallmouth. (Photo: FLW) |
The
road Roger Cousens had to travel to live out his dream of being a professional
bass angler in the United States included a 19-hour flight to Atlanta and a
five-hour drive to Burnside, Ky., where today, the 62-year-old International
Division qualifier from Zimbabwe took the day-one lead in the Costa FLW Series
Championship on Lake Cumberland.
To be fair, Cousens competed in
the U.S. a few times in the 1990s, but the Evinrude and Mercury outboard
technician has never fished a pro-level event with as much on the line as there
is in this one. After catching a 17-pound, 2-ounce limit that included a mix of
largemouths and smallmouths, he leads the way over California’s Robert Nakatomi
by 3 ounces.
“It
feels fantastic right now,” he says. “It’s pretty hard to believe that I’m
leading a tournament of this caliber with this number of anglers. It’s pretty
amazing.”
Cousens
says he’s a big-bass specialist, which he’s proven in his last two FLW events.
To qualify for this week’s championship, he weighed in more than 100 pounds in
three days of fishing at the FLW Zimbabwe Championship.
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