by Curtis Niedermier
FLW Press Release
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| Greg's monster bag on day 2 helped keep Neal and the rest of the Top 10 at arm's length. (Photo: FLW) |
FLORENCE, Ala. – It was the spot of a lifetime – a shallow ledge, plumb full of “hammers” – and Greg Hackney found it just 45 minutes into his first day of practice on Pickwick Lake.
For four days, Hackney pounded away on the spot to the tune of a 20-bass tournament total worth 97 pounds, 7 ounces. He caught a jaw-dropping day-two stringer of 31-6 to take over the tournament lead, then milked the bite through thunderstorms, gushing current and heavy spectator traffic over the weekend to make sure that he never relinquished it.
In today’s final round of the Walmart FLW Tour event presented by Straight Talk Wireless and hosted by the Florence/Lauderdale Tourism Bureau, Hackney pulled a 21-pound, 9-ounce limit off the school on his magic spot and locked up his first regular-season Tour victory, earning $100,000 and likely writing his ticket to this year’s Forrest Wood Cup.
The spot
Coming into Pickwick, Hackney figured two things. First, he needed to find something away from the crowds. Second, because of the late spring, there might still be some shad spawning, and the bass could be a little bit behind. He was spot-on with his predictions.
“My fish were pre- and postspawn,” Hackney says. “It took awhile for me to figure that out, but I think today I possibly caught some bedding fish up on top, staging kind of on the side. And I caught a lot of bucks.
“Everything is late,” he adds. “I knew there was no way they’ve had time to get finished spawning and look like that [with fat guts].”
Hackney located his tournament-winning spot early the first morning of practice. He was working around some shallow ledges that he’d been inspecting on his electronic map. When he dug in further, he found a ditch running up through the top of the ledge.
“There was a high spot with a small break, and it had a massive mussel bed up top,” he says. “The shell was on one side, but the other side was smooth. There was a ditch there, about 2 feet deep. When fish were staging, they were in that little depression [ditch] off to the side. It was real subtle.”
The spot was located on the backwater side of the main river, upstream from the bridge that carries the Natchez Trace Parkway across the Tennessee River.
“In practice, I was cranking up that ditch, and at the end of it was an ‘oil slick’ the size of my truck,” Hackney says. “I thought, ‘That can’t be what I think it is.’”
It was the telltale sign of a bunch of bait losing a battle to a bunch of jumbo predators – 6- and 7-pound largemouths and 4-pound smallmouths hammering away at gizzard shad that Hackney estimates were 10 to 12 inches long.
