By Andrew Canulette
BASS PRESS RELEASE
When the final day of the 10th annual Toyota Texas Bass
Classic began, Matt Herren held a slim 12-ounce lead over Bryan Thrift.
When the day was done, Thrift had closed the gap – but not
enough to win.
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| Junk fishing his way to victory. (Photo: BASS) |
Herren, an Elite Series pro from Alabama, had a three-day
total of 51 pounds, 12ounces, which was eight ounces more than Thrift. The
victory netted Herren a $100,000 cash prize, a Nitro Z20 boat with dual
Power-Poles, and bragging rights in one of the most prestigious bass fishing
tournaments.
But most importantly, it got Herren his first professional
level win in nine years (he previously won an FLW stop in 2007.) He has never
won a B.A.S.S. Elite Series event.
“Man, it’s incredible,” Herren said, after weighing a 17-4
limit on Sunday. “A lot of hard work goes into this, and there’s a lot of
people who pay a big price to let me do what I do. They all know who they are …
It’s amazing. You always wonder every day when you get up; you finish second,
you finish third. It’s like ‘When? When is my time?’”
The star power on display in the 38-man field was not lost
on Herren; a 14-year pro fishing in his fourth TTBC. But he brought some of his
own expertise to the tournament, with five Bassmaster Classic berths and six
Forrest Wood Cup appearances on his resume.
“These guys are too good to give anything away,” Herren said
earlier in the week, while keeping secretive about his techniques on Ray
Roberts. After Sunday’s win, he revealed that there wasn’t a heck of a lot of
intricacy to his practices.
“Dude, I junk-fished the whole tournament,” he said with a
smile. “The first day of practice on Tuesday, I figured out the big fish were
up in the shallows and up in the willows. About mid-day on the second day of
practice, we started losing a lot of water. They were draining Ray Roberts. So
I started looking for someplace where the big ones would go.
“I got on a deal looking at cedar trees in the back of the
drains. In Texas, they call the little channels that run up into those flats
drains. Well, the last two or three trees before you got to the willows, the
bigger females had pulled up right there.”
Bright sun was critical to his 19-plus pound limit on
Friday, however, when Herren didn’t get the conditions he was looking for later
in the TTBC, he had to adjust from the jigs he threw on Day 1.
“On Friday, I couldn’t get bit,” he said. “I started
to recognize I’d have to run new water … So I scrounged up 15 pounds, from 11
o’clock on, around those cedar trees and those drains. Today, with the cloud
cover, I knew I couldn’t catch them … I ran up to a bridge with a little bit of
a shad spawn going on.”
He said he first lost a 5-pounder first thing in the
morning, but then caught a 3-pounder, a 3-8, and a 2-plug on a square-bill DH
Custom Lures 2.0.
“Then I had to run around some more, and I decided not to
fight it, and just go fish,” Herren said. “I just kept it down, and fought it
and fought it. And I caught 17 something pounds. I’d like to tell you I knew
right where I was going, but I didn’t.
“With the conditions we had, with the water dropping, (it
was difficult.) But I love to fish shallow, visible water. If I’m in anything
that I can see, I feel as I am as good as there is walking. That’s how I was
brought up fishing, and it suited me here.”
Thrift, who hails from North Carolina and won the TTBC in
2012, kept steady pressure on Herren throughout the day. It was in the final
minutes of Day 3 (at 3:07 p.m. precisely,) that he lit into a fish that looked
like it might clinch him a second TTBC victory.
That bass, caught only eight minutes before anglers had to
stop fishing, weighed 3-12, and it allowed Thrift to cull up 1 ½ pounds. That
left him tragically short – a mere eight ounces – of Herren.
Thrift’s bag on Sunday weighed 17-8, and he caught the
majority of his bass flipping with a Damiki Knock Out.
“The last two days, that definitely was my go-to bait,” he
said. “I was making as many casts as I can. I would have loved to win it
again.”
The remainder of the Tundra 10 was composed of Luke Clausen,
47-8; Andy Morgan, 47-0; Dave Lefebre, 46-12; Aaron Martens, 46-8; Cody Meyer,
45-8; Kevin VanDam, 44-12; Chris Zaldain, 41-12; and Greg Hackney, 41-0.
Zaldain, an Elite Series pro from California and the leader
after Day 1, caught a bass weighing 7-12 on Friday that was the heaviest of the
tournament. It won him the Big Bass Award and its prize of a 2016 Toyota Tundra
truck.
Morgan won the LEER Heavy Weight Award for the 22-0 pound
bag he caught on Saturday. That was the highest single-day total caught by any
of the pros in the three-day tournament, and it earned the FLW Tour stalwart a
new LEER truck cap.
The Toyota Texas Fest (and the TTBC, which is part of that
event,) is a significant fund-raiser for the TPWD. In 10 years, it has
contributed $2.5 million to the department, which has put the funds to use
supporting youth fishing and urban outreach programs across Texas.
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