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.
He
rigged the Ned rig with a Strike King Ned
Ocho Wormin green pumpkin on a 1/8-ounce Gene Larew Ned Rig
Pighead Jig Head. His jig was either a 3/8- or 1/2-ounce Strike King Bitsy
Flip Jig, which has a bigger hook than the standard Bitsy Bug.
He paired it with a green pumpkin Strike King Baby
Rage Craw.
“The
first day, they’d eat it on the drop,” Upshaw says of the jig. “As soon as you
flipped it up there, it just swam off with it. They were right up on the bank.
Yesterday, they kind of shifted out a little bit, and today they were even
deeper. I still caught two up them real shallow, but I had to drag it even
farther to get bites today. I was just slowly dragging it down there.
“I
was fishing the jig anywhere between 5 and 14 feet. I was flipping it.
Basically, I’d let it free-fall on slack line, and that’s when I’d know if they
ate it on the fall. And I let it just gradually fall on the bottom down the
bluff. I let it fall and feathered it all the way down.”
The
jig bite was a “timing deal,” says Upshaw. The fish really weren’t up on the
bluffs in the first hour or two in the morning. The first day, in the rain and
wind, he spent the opening hour or so throwing a buzzbait, but after that, he
simply fished the jig and hoped to get a bonus bite or two before the better
smallies finally moved up.
The
timing factor was probably a benefit for Upshaw more than anyone else today,
since a two-hour fog delay held up takeoff. Many of the top 10 pros reported a
strong morning bite, but they didn’t get there in time today. The short day
really hurt them. Upshaw’s fish fired like clockwork.
“Typically,
bluff bites, for me, they just don’t eat early,” he adds. “I’ve never caught
them early. I know other guys do, but I don’t.
“The
timing deal, when they really bite on those bluffs, is anywhere between 10
o’clock and about 3. Then, as the sun goes down, they stop biting on them. I
don’t know what they do; they just don’t bite.”
Nevertheless,
Upshaw knew enough to pocket the $52,000 winner’s check. It goes nicely with
the $100,000 he won back in the spring. Smallmouths, it seems, pay off nicely
for the Oklahoma pro.
Top 10 Pros
1.
Andrew Upshaw – Tulsa, Okla. – 42-15 (15) – $52,500
2.
Rob Burns – Plano, Texas – 41-5 (15) – $25,200
3.
Matt Pangrac – Broken Arrow, Okla. – 38-6 (14) – $20,100
4.
Luke Plunkett – Pinson, Ala. – 36-9 (15) – $15,000
5.
Travis Manson – Conshohocken, Pa. – 35-1 (14) – $10,000
6.
Rusty Salewske – Alpine, Ca. – 33-10 (13) – $8,000
7.
Laramy Strickland – Bushnell, Fla. – 31-6 (11) – $7,000
8.
Steve Floyd – Leesburg, Ohio – 30-6 (13) – $8,000
9.
Brent Algeo – Ozark, Mo. – 28-7 (12) – $5,000
10.
David Valdivia – Norwalk, Calif. – 24-1 (9) – $4,500
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