Jeremy Starks | Bassmaster

It’s Monday after the Potomac River Tournament. I had a decent first day. I caught 11 pounds, 3 ounces. That wasn’t great, but I was in the top 50. The second day I didn’t do quite as well and ended up with 9-5, one pound out of the money.

I had a limit each day, and I secured a spot for next year on the Elite Series tour. But I didn’t make the Classic. There’s no way I can make it now and that’s a disappointment. But at least it looks like there’s no way I can get knocked out of next year, and at least that’s a good thing.

Looking at the year overall, it was up-and-down. I had some good finishes and some pretty bad ones. We’ve still got one tournament to go - at Lake Toho. But I know this, I’m already looking forward to next year.

The Potomac this year was real similar to last year in the amount of grass. It was almost the same in that respect, and I had a top 12 finish last year. This year I was catching as many keepers as I could, but they were all small. The first day I probably had a limit the first 20 minutes I fished.

I was throwing a four-inch ringworm around the edge of the grass. And then I started flipping for bigger fish. But the big bite never came. I just catching little fish. There just weren’t enough pounds.

Actually, the first day I threw a Berkeley four-inch wacky crawler. I was mojo rigging it with a 1-8 pound weight.  It was great. I probably caught 25 fish both day, but there just weren’t enough pounds. The second day I broke one off that was about three pounds and that would have been enough. But it didn’t happen. 

Congratulations to Skeet Reece. Two years in a row he’s done real well at the Potomac. He deserved this one.

Now we’re going to Tohoe. I’ve been there practicing. When I was there the water was real. Now the water is up, and that will help.

This tournament on Lake Erie is going to be interesting. I’m going out early, and I’ll have a chance to get to a spot near the launch ramp. But I think that spot is going to get busy.

I’ve had some luck throwing a drop shot and getting fish to bit from about 23 to 30 feet. But some of the other guys said they’ve been getting close to 20 pounds a day, and I haven’t had that much good fortune.

I also want to mention that we lost a great outdoor writer in Tim Tucker. I’ve been reading what he writes for probably 25 years. He did a couple of stories on me and they were really good. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.

I was able to bring in a 16-7 bag today-my best day on Grand Lake, and I finished number 27 for the Sooner Run.  This is really a great fishing lake which is just flat-out full of bass. 

 I feel real good about my finish here as we now turn for the North where I did pretty well last year.  I’ll try to add to this post later to fill in some details about my day three.  Here’s the audio add-on to this post:

The picture is from day three and shows me talking with Bradley Stringer while waiting for the weigh in.

The second day of this tournament was a little different. I went to the points where I caught the fish on Thursday, but the schools had moved. I finally found them a few points up, and I caught a bunch of fish. I fell back into the forties, but I’ll be out there tomorrow.
I’ll bet I caught 30 fish, but none of them were big. This lake is great. I mean, I’ve never seen a place with so many two- and three-pound fish.
Boyd Duckett had 19-6 today, a huge bag. But he only had about eight fish. Anyway, I talk about it in a little more depth on this audio.

I have to say I was pretty happy with things went the first day of the tournament. I had 15 pounds, 11 ounces, even with a dead fish penalty.

Sometimes things get a little tense on the tour. I found a spot and I was catching them good. Paul Elias wanted to move in on the spot and he got a little aggravated that I wouldn’t move on. I felt like since he had an earlier launch time than I had he could have been there before I was. Oh, well, this kind of stuff happens.

I talk about that and a few other things that happened on the first day. 

Everybody’s here is trying to adjust to the muddy water on Grand Lake as we head into this week’s tournament. There’s been so much rain that conditions are not like anything we’ve seen on this lake.

I’m coming off a good tournament at Smith Mountain Lake, and I hope I’ll keep catching them here. I figure it will take at least 15 to 16 pounds a day to get into the top 12. 

I talk a little bit about this, and I’ll follow up with a lot more as the tournament goes on.

I’m coming off the best tournament I’ve had this year. It was at Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia, a beautiful lake. The people there were fantastic. I finished 20th.
It felt good to get on some fish and get the bites. I was steady for three days. I know a lot of anglers tell a story like this, but I could have done even better. As they say, you should have seen the one that got away.
Now it’s on to Grand Lake in Oklahoma. We’re headed for a lake that’s about seven feet higher than it was last year when we competed. It will be different.

The fact that I’m a professional angler on the Elite Series tour sometimes gives me opportunities to do things some pretty cool and interesting things. They’re the kind of things that I’m honored to do. I know this is a blog about fishing, but I’ve been traveling a good bit the past few weeks, and I wanted to tell you about two of those opportunities that came up while I was gone.

The first thing happened last week at Fort Bragg in North Carolina at an event called Warriors on the Water. It was one of the neatest things I’ve ever been involved in. It was a fishing tournament held on Jordan Lake for soldiers and veterans who recently retrned to the United States from active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I wasn’t the only pro angler there. Glenn DeLong, Marty Stone, Gerald Swindle, Steve Daniel, Mark Rogers and Keith Phillips were some of the others there. My guess is that they all had the same experience I had, and I thought the whole thing was incredible. I don’t know if I’ve ever been around such an appreciative group of good people. They were thanking us. We should have been thanking them.

I really hope I get to go back next year.

The second event was kind of different. It was an event I volunteered to attend on behalf of my sponsor - the Friends of Coal. It was a coal industry rally in Logan, West Virginia.

Pretty much anybody that knows me knows that I support the coal industry in West Virginia for several reasons. One is that my state needs the coal industry. But another reason is that I’d like to help people understand that the people in today’s coal industry are concerned about maintaining a clean and healthy environment. We have “environmentalists” in the Appalachian region that tell the world something different, but I’m telling you I wouldn’t put Friends of Coal on my shirt if I wasn’t positive that the industry cares about the quality of the water I fish in.

The rally was organized to show concern over the Guyan Surface Mine in southern West Virginia. More than 200 miners will be out of work if a valley fill permit is denied.

Although I’m not an expert on every aspect of mining, I do know that the quality of water coming off mining operations is filtered and clean. And I’m not sure that a lot of the people who call themselves environmentalists - the ones that want to stop mining altogether - want the public to know that.

And another thing they don’t want to talk about is what the country would do if we stopped mining coal. Coal is responsible for about half of the country’s electricity, and more like 99 percent of the power in my state.

But back to fishing. If I thought coal mining was bad for water quality in this state and I couldn’t fish in the waters near a coal mine, I might be standing with the anti-coal people. But the water quality is good, so I support the industry that gives a whole lot of people good jobs.

I’m on the road from West Virginia to Arkansas to take part in a huge tournament that’s put on by one of my sponsors: BassCat. The company puts on this huge tournament every year, and they ask some of their anglers to be there.

BassCat’s a great sponsor and they’ve supported me big time, so it’s only right to show up for an event like this when they ask me to come. I think there’s going to be about 700 boats on the water fishing in this tournament. I’m sure it gets kind of crowded, and it’s probably more of an event than a tournament. Anyway, I’m on the road in southern Illinois.

I caught a lot of fish today at Guntersville on the first day of competition. But I couldn’t get the really big bites that I needed. I found the fish at the places I had marked, but the big ones were too deep to see. And I was trying to sight fish. I hope I can get the big ones tomorrow. You can hear more about the conditions and the bait I used by clicking on the audio link below.