Walmart FLW Tour Potomac River Day 1: Adrian Avena Out Front, AOY Race Tightens!

Jersey Boy takes lead with solid limit. 

by Sean Ostruszka

FLW PRESS RELEASE

It’s amazing what a good night’s sleep can do, apparently.

Hailing from Vineland, N.J. – roughly three and a half hours from the Potomac River – Adrian Avena gushed about getting to sleep in his own bed Saturday night before practice began for the Walmart FLW Tour event presented by Ranger Boats on the Potomac River. He had plenty of reason to gush, too, after sacking up 16 pounds, 12 ounces to grab the lead on day one.

Avena on his way to winning first Tour Event! (Photo: FLW)

“I had a good day, but I’d even like the bag I culled,” Avena says. “I probably culled another 12-pound bag. I had 15 keepers today, and there were a few places where I left them biting.”

That has been pretty much par for the course for Avena since practice started. He figures he averaged 12 to 14 pounds a day during practice doing some pretty “off-the-wall stuff.”

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Bryan Thrift Wins the 2015 FLW Tour Event on Lake Eufaula with 69-14lbs.

Thrift Wins by 3; Gustafson Finishes 4th!

by Rob Newell

FLW PRESS RELEASE

The “numbers game.”

It’s a term that Bryan Thrift used to describe his fishing on Lake Eufaula back in 2013 when he finished runner-up to Randy Haynes in a Walmart FLW Tour event.

The method to his numbers madness was to hit as many solitary objects – stumps, brush piles, rocks, logs – on the bottom of Lake Eufaula as humanly possible in an eight-hour tournament day.

When Thrift saw that Lake Eufaula was back on the 2015 Walmart FLW Tour schedule for May of this year, he grinned that patented Bryan Thrift grin because he already knew how to crunch the numbers at Eufaula.

And Thrift is still grinning. After sacking up a final-day catch of 15 pounds, 5 ounces to top off 69-14 for the week, Thrift made the numbers work for his fourth FLW Tour win. He added another $125,000 to his bank account.

“This is my favorite lake in the country. I absolutely love it,” Thrift says. “I’ve wanted to win here so bad for so long. I’ve finished second here in two other FLW events [the 2013 Tour Major and 2010 FLW Series], so to finally get over the hump feels pretty good.”

2015 Walmart FLW Tour Lake Eufaula Day 3: Morrow and Thrift One and Two by Ounces!

Shallow Bass Heat Up!

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The numbers game at the Walmart FLW Tour event presented by Quaker State on Lake Eufaula has turned into a game of musical brush piles. What started as a full field of pros running dozens of brush piles has turned into a handful of leaders running the same brush piles in the same area of the lake.

Now the game is to rotate through the brush piles in hopes of being on the right one when the fish start biting.

The pro who has been the most successful at mastering the musical brush pile mash-up is Troy Morrow, who toted 15 pounds, 4 ounces to the scale today to hold the lead with a slim margin of 4 ounces over a very threatening Bryan Thrift.

Morrow’s game has now turned from running as many brush piles as possible to fishing “around” the pressure being created by other competitors who are targeting the same piles.

“Yeah, I’ve now come to realize how many of us are running some of the same stuff,” Morrow says. “Some of my best piles I hoped no one would find are being fished by others, too. My plan was to sort of flip-flop my piles – hit one set one day, then hit another set another day so the first set could rest. Obviously, that’s all out the window now.”

As a result, Morrow says he now has to be extremely aware of who is fishing what piles at what times.

“It definitely throws you off rotation,” he explains. “The whole game here is to get a good rotation going. Catch one out of this pile; catch one out of the next pile. But if there is a boat on the next one, it sort of kicks you out of rotation and off your rhythm, and you have to adjust for that by avoiding the next two piles and picking up somewhere else farther down the line.”

To be clear, Morrow is not accusing anyone of hole-jumping his spots. He knows that a lot of these brush piles were found by his competitors in practice with the extremely powerful electronics being used these days.

“These fish are so wary of the pressure,” he continues. “It amazes me how ‘set up’ the fish were the first day for a crankbait. They were ready to eat the first thing that came by. But now, they are scattered out away from the piles. I think the pressure literally pushes them out. I caught several fish the last couple days on casts that completely missed the pile.”

In terms of lures, Morrow says he has had to move away from the crankbait that produced so well the first day to more inconspicuous lures.

2015 Walmart FLW Tour Lake Eufaula Day 2: Morrow Takes Lead with 39-09!

Weather Changes and No Current Kills Bite
FLW PRESS RELEASE

The “numbers game” continued at the Walmart FLW Tour event presented by Quaker State on Lake Eufaula today, and weights fell off a bit as anglers began to realize that some of their “numbers” were also the numbers of other anglers. In essence, anglers can only run so many brush piles before the brush piles being hit start to overlap, and that pressure took its toll today.

In addition to the fishing pressure, cloudy skies and windy conditions made for far less efficient fishing of the brush when compared to day one’s hot, sunny, slick conditions.

One angler who was able to avoid the pressure to some extent was Troy Morrow, who took over the lead today. Morrow backed his day-one catch of 21 pounds, 8 ounces with 18-01 today for a two-day total of 39-09.

Morrow says that being in the last flight was a huge help because it allowed him to run some of his better brush piles after many other anglers had left for weigh-in.

“I only had 7 or 8 pounds for the longest time today,” he says. “I figured I needed at least 10 pounds to fish on Saturday, so I ‘dinked around’ with a drop-shot to get to about 10 or 11 pounds.”

Once he hit that weight, Morrow began running his best brush piles with bigger baits. He caught his fish on a crankbait yesterday but had to switch to another big lure today.

“Right at the end of the day I got into an area where I had three brush piles in a row,” he says. “I got the fish to fire up, and I culled from 11 pounds to 18 pounds pretty quickly. I’m really not sure if it was the bait change or the time of day or what. But the fishing suddenly got really good for a few minutes, and I took advantage of it. Being in the last flight worked to my favor big time.”

Morrow mounts attack as most stumble. (Photo: FLW)

Morrow admits that he had to burn more of his premium brush piles over the last two days than he wanted to.

“I was trying to save some of the ace piles for the finals, but I had to tap them today,” he says. “I still have a lot of marginal piles left that I haven’t fished, but I don’t feel they’re as good as the ones I relied on today.”

2015 Walmart FLW Tour Lake Eufaula Day 1: Client Davis Whacks 22-9 and Lead.

Deep and Shallow Patterns All Working

by Rob Newell

FLW PRESS RELEASE

A numbers game – that’s the predominant theme among the leaders at the Walmart FLW Tour event presented by Quaker State on Lake Eufaula.

The game is not about catching numbers of fish, but rather, running numbers of isolated spots that feature some kind of cover – a single stump, log, brush pile, piece of standing timber or rock is all it takes. The object of the game is to hit as many of these places in a day as possible.

A lot of unknowns on Day 1: Shad spawn, falling water, deep fish.
Davis found the right ones to lead the pack.
(Photo: FLW)

“I’ve fished this lake all my life, and I have hundreds of these little one-stop places logged in my GPS,” Davis says. “I stop at each one, make a few casts, then I’m gone to the next.

“And it really doesn’t matter what it is,” he continues. “A lot of them are brush piles, and the fish are pulling out to them with the falling water and rising temperatures, so they will probably reload throughout the week.”

Davis says he hit two “wads” of fish during the day, but he defines a wad as being two fish on one piece of cover.