Tennessee pro catches 12 bass for 42-12 in Championship Round to earn $100,000 top prize, Sprague catches 6-2 largemouth to earn $100,000 Berkley Big Bass Award
FRANKLIN COUNTY, Va. – Entering the Championship Round at B&W Trailer Hitches Heavy Hitters Presented by Bass Pro Shops, Nick Hatfield didn’t really believe he had much of a chance of leaving with the title belt. Sure, he tried to talk himself into a scenario in which every other angler struggled and he found a magic school of Smith Mountain Lake bass. But given that he’d never led at any point during his first three days of competition and squeaked into the Top 10 by finishing eighth in the Knockout Round, his focus was more on winning the $100,000 Berkley Big Bass award up for grabs on the final day.
Yet Hatfield took the lead 5 minutes after lines in Thursday and never looked back. He stacked up 42 pounds, 12 ounces on 12 scorable bass to top Justin Lucas by 13-12 for his first Bass Pro Tour victory. That earned him not only the championship belt but a $100,000 paycheck, plus an extra $10,000 for catching the biggest bass during his second day of qualifying.
Hatfield wasn’t the only angler to leave Smith Mountain with a six-figure payday. While Jeff Sprague caught just two scorable bass on the day, one of them tipped the scales at 6-2. More than a pound heavier than the next-largest bass, that easily earned Berkley Big Bass honors, netting Sprague his second career $100,000 big bass bonus.
Hatfield never felt farther away from the Heavy Hitters title than at the end of his first day competing on Smith Mountain Lake. During Group A’s first day of the Qualifying Round, he mustered just five scorable bass for 15-1, which had him nearly 10 pounds back of the elimination line.
Yet that lackluster day laid the foundation for Hatfield’s win. He’d caught all his weight off the same spot during the first period – a flat, main-lake point where both largemouth and smallmouth were ambushing spawning blueback herring. However, having never competed on Smith Mountain before, when his bite slacked, he set off in search of something better. He never caught another scorable bass on the day.
That taught Hatfield, who had little experience fishing for herring eaters entering this event, that he’d be better off staying put and waiting out the lulls. So, when he returned to the water, Hatfield parked himself on the point where he’d caught his Day 1 weight and stacked up nearly 56 pounds on 17 scorable bass, vaulting all the way from 11th place to third and catching a 5-6 that won Big Bass honors in the process.
“Day 1, I started pretty much where I ended up winning the tournament,” Hatfield said. “I caught 15 pounds pretty quick and then bailed on it. I thought, ‘Man, they’re catching them pretty quick; I’ve got to go do something else.’ And I’d had several bites up shallow, just fishing the bank, and I went and did that, and I never caught another one the rest of the day. So, I found myself in a hole right off the rip.
“Day 2, I’m like, I’m going to stick it out here, and that was really when I was like, dang, there’s a lot of fish on these places.”
At that point, even though most of the top performers were catching their fish off steep banks on the more riverine upper end of the lake, Hatfield knew his best bet was to stick with his flat point pattern. The bite wasn’t quite as strong during the Knockout Round, when Hatfield totaled 41-13, but he was at least able to finish among the Top 10 and find a few new spots to add to his rotation.
“I didn’t have anything else, and I’d already seen some big ones in practice,” he said. “So, I thought that was my best chance to try and win and catch a big one for the big fish. I just stuck it out. Regardless of what happened today, I was going to do that no matter what.”
Entering the Championship Round, Hatfield assumed he’d milked the spot that produced his Qualifying Round weight for all it was worth. He planned to start on one of the new places he’d identified Wednesday. However, during the 30-minute ride around prior to lines in, he saw that no other boats were sitting on the point, and he couldn’t pass it up.
That turned out to be a prudent decision. Hatfield caught his first scorable bass, a 3-15, just 5 minutes after lines in. Twelve minutes later, he landed a 3-9 and a 4-5 back-to-back.
Then, Hatfield ran to his second spot and hit the flurry that really separated him from the pack. He caught four scorable bass totaling 13-10 in the span of 5 minutes. At that point, he had 25-7 on seven scorable bass. With a scorable bass needing to weigh 3 pounds or more, the rest of the field had landed just four fish total, with no other angler catching more than one.
Hatfield duped all four of those bass on a bait that’s not usually associated with the herring spawn – a SPRO Aruku Shad lipless crankbait. He admitted he didn’t even tie on a lipless before the start of the event. But, while he found some success mixing up more typical herring-imitating staples during the event – a Megabass 110 SR jerkbait, a jointed swimbait, a jighead minnow, a few different dragging presentations – he needed something he could reel fast and keep out of the slimy grass on the bottom to fool the well-educated bass.
“I wanted something that I could burn really fast,” he explained. “Because if you threw just a regular swimbait or a topwater, it wasn’t fast enough. It had to be moving really fast to get them to react to it and bite it.
“It fit what I needed to catch the fish where they were, because I needed it to go really fast, and I needed it to stay out of the grass and just move really quick. And it was kind of surprising to me that they bit it, too, because they wouldn’t bite a whole lot of other things.”
Hatfield added a 3-pounder in the final minute of the first period, then plucked four more fish during the second frame to extend his lead over Lucas to more than 13 pounds. He figured if he could just catch two or three more scorable bass, he’d have his first BPT win.
Instead, he never got another bite. Hatfield spent the entire final period convinced that someone would find a fired-up school and run him down. But Lucas, who was also targeting herring-eaters on points, couldn’t add to his total either.
“It was the longest 2 1/2 hours of my life, for sure,” he said. “I kept asking, ‘Any changes? Any changes?’ And (my boat official) said no every time. I really couldn’t believe it. You know how good this group of guys are. It’s really unbelievable that they struggled and didn’t catch me, because this lake is a good enough fishery, you pull up to the right place, right time, where somebody hasn’t messed with them, and you’re going to get right in a hurry.”
Given that Hatfield didn’t see this win coming, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that, shortly after receiving his title belt, he said it hadn’t sunk in yet. But the 31-year-old acknowledged that landing his first Bass Pro Tour win gives him a jolt of confidence that he’s good enough to sustain a career fishing at the highest level.
“To get a win against that group of guys, it means a lot,” he said. “It really helps your confidence, and it just lets me know that I can compete with them. I knew I could, because I’ve had some good finishes so far. But to actually seal the deal on one of them, it really just helps me boost my confidence to know that I’m for sure where I need to be.”
Sprague was one of the many anglers who got to the Championship Round by fishing up the Roanoke River. Whether due to a shift in the conditions, mounting pressure or both, that bite finally fizzled out Thursday – none of the six competitors who spent most of their time in that area cracked the 20-pound mark.
But Sprague made up for an otherwise trying day in one hookset. Early in Period 2, the 6-2 that would earn him $100,000 bit his bladed jig tipped with a Lake Fork Pro Craw. It wasn’t until Sprague got the fish next to the boat and saw it that he realized just how big it was.
“She rolled, and I saw it was a good one, and I told my boat official and my cameraman, ‘That’s a 5-pounder-plus, guys. That’s a big fish,’” Sprague said. “Long story short, it worked out, and we got our hands on her jaw and brought her in the boat. And she was beat up and beautiful.”
Sprague credited an adjustment for producing the lucrative bite. Whereas he had been keying on steep, main-river banks where bass seemed to be feeding on spawning shad in previous days, he started venturing into more coves and pockets once he saw that bite had tapered off. The second one he tried produced the 6-pounder, which he believes was a late spawner.
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