Gagliardi & Company: My Take as a Nearby Observer

FLW photo by Jeff Samsel

It seems some fuss has arisen about Anthony Gaglardi fishing close to a local angler on Lake Murray during the final morning of the Forrest Wood Cup, with some folks contending that Gagliardi was unsportsmanlike or unethical. Everyone has the right to an opinion, but I don't think any of the folks making those contentions were there at the time. I was, so I thought it might be fitting to offer my take.

From the onset, I'll acknowledge that the other angler was in the area first. Also, it's public water, and he had every right to stay and fish. Many anglers likely would have stepped back, knowing what was as stake for someone else, but that's a personal choice. That said, Gagliardi didn't claim otherwise. He never asked the other angler to yield or did anything to try to push him away. He simply joined him fishing the area.

Regarding the question of moving in on someone else's spot, I believe an important distinction must be made. The other angler was not fishing a defined hotspot, such as a sweet spot on top of a hump, a specific brushpile or a dock. He was working an area where the bass were schooling. On virtually any lake where fish school on the surface, whether those fish are largemouths, stripers, white bass of something else, anglers commonly run those school together. The whole cove doesn't belong to the first angler on the lake. And while I couldn't hear every word spoken, by my understanding, the other angler didn't object to Gagliardi fishing near him. He didn't like the of armada of onlookers that saw his area, and that would have been the same whether they actually had fished 100 yards from one another or 10 feet apart.

Gagliardi also didn't crowd the other angler. He did move to the same area, but the other angler actually did far more pushing tight to Gagliardi's boat and shadowing every shift, based on what I saw. Again, though, they were fishing schoolers, so they both adjusted positions based on where the fish were breaking.

Closely related, I think Gagliardi's comment in the press conference that he threw over the other angler a couple of times made it sound like he was being a bully and felt self important because of the tournament. That wasn't the case. They both threw across one another a couple of times. That happens sometimes when you're chasing schoolers and one suddenly comes up. You only have a moment when bass are eating herring, so you react. A fish comes up, and you cast to it. Occasionally that puts you across the other angler, or, if the fish are sort of between you, your baits might land simultaneously side-by-side.

Most importantly, Gagliardi never said a harsh word. Even when told that he needed to "get a real job," he didn't counter with anything negative. He simply told the other angler that he'd caught fish there the previous day and was going to stay and fish that school, and then he quietly went about his business. He represented FLW and tournament bass fishing well, as I know he will continue to do as Forrest Wood Cup champion.

Final Morning - Forrest Wood Cup

Boats are launching in the darkness just across the way, and soon they'll be coming around to the docks where they'll stage to take off for the final day of competition in the Forrest Wood Cup.

Only 10 remain, and with the uncertainty of the bite it's legitimately possible that anyone who made it to today could cone away world champion and half a million dollars richer.

Only 2 1/2 pounds separate the top 5, which includes threes Carolina anglers. Leading the pack is Brent Ehrler, one of three former Forrest Wood Cup champions in the Top 10.

The wind is blowing only slightly and stars are plentiful above an hour and a half before takeoff.

I'll be following one top anglers this morning, although I don't have my specific assignment yet. Yesterday I watched Bryan Thrift, which was a grand lesson about efficiency. Other mornings I've followed Casey Ashley and Anthony Gagliardi. All three are in the top 5.

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens on the water and especially in the weigh-in this afternoon.

Cool & Misty Columbia?

Word from the water is that yesterday's high in Lake Murray Country never broke out of the 70s and that it was misty and almost cool feeling. Having spent a couple of summers in Columbia, which were hotter than most summers in Florida when I was growing up, that's kind of hard for me to imagine in mid-August. Seems it's true, though.

Apparently the water temperature has dropped about 5 or 6 degrees since the end of the allowable pre-practice time for the Forrest Wood Cup a couple of weeks ago, and the shallow and deep bites have picked up. How that will translate to tournament days, which are still a few days way and are supposed to be sunny and hot, no one knows for sure. With conditions projected to change so much between now and the tournament, David Dudley calls the fish he is catching now "liars," which have the potential to confuse matters more than they teach.

One more day of practice, and I should be in Columbia before it is over. I'm driving down tomorrow and plan to arrive in time to drive around a bit and talk to the pros during media day and will be reporting what I learn on FLW's Forrest Wood Cup page, where plenty of written and video updates are already being posted.

View from the Water: Forrest Wood Cup

2013 Forrest Wood Cup champion Randall Tharp on morning
No. 1, before a single cast had been made.

By far my favorite place to watch tournament action is from the water. Although the computer or a media room provide more big-picture news, reading reports simply isn't the same as seeing how anglers are working cover, what their body language says, how the water looks and the air feels and such.

Normally, I can't really do that. Not for more than a day, anyway. Stories need to be written, and if I'm physically at en event it usually makes more sense to spend maybe a day on the water and invest other daytime hours either working on the computer or doing other things that are associated with the event.

Last year, during the Forrest Wood Cup, I got to spend a bit of time on the water, and it was cool learning a bit about how the Red River fishes during the summer and seeing the contrasting strategies of working backwaters and the main river.  I even watched Randall Tharp fish for a while. At time I had no idea that he was working on what would turn out to be the winning strategy.

This year it's my job. A this year's Cup, which begins on Thursday on South Carolina's Lake Murray, I'm contributing to FLW's live coverage, so I'll be on the water reporting back what I see, probably all four days.

Be sure to keep the Forrest Wood Cup page bookmarked and watch the FLW Twitter feed for a fabulous flow of images, stories, notes and video clips, including iON footage from the pros' boats.

Today is Walmart Pro Day (12-2) and Chevy Pro Day (5-7) in Columbia, so most pros are in town and things officially get started in a couple of hours. Practice begins tomorrow morning!

Final Cup Preparations

Yesterday David Dudley posted a photo of himself preparing gear for the Forrest Wood Cup -- at his boat with compartment doors open and boxes and rods everywhere. Practice begins Sunday morning, four days from now, so I suppose there's a lot of that going on. Gear sorting, hook sharpening, forecast studying, pre-practice pondering, strategizing... And for any angler who prepped everything early and is fully ready, a lot of waiting and anticipating.

Forty-five pros qualified to compete. One will walk away world champion and half a million dollars richer. Sixteen are fishing the Forrest Wood Cup for the first time. Others are veterans, some with Cup and Classic experience. A handful have even won the Cup before.  Some are traveling from far away and have never seen Lake Murray. Anthony Gagliardi lives on the lake.

For now, everyone is even, and when they blast off a week from tomorrow, they'll all be tied for first and last place with zero pounds. Word is that it will be a grind.

I'll be there to see first-hand what different anglers make work. But first I have some preparation of my own to do: camera cards to clear, batteries to charge, stories to write, junk to pack...  Better get to it, I suppose.

ICAST Friday

The ICAST show is always substantially slower on Friday than on the first two days, with a lot of buyers, media and folks in the booths having finished their business and started toward home. It's a good day to look at stuff in less crowded booths. It's sometimes a bad day to visit people because the person who deals with media often has gone home.

Today is my day to walk the floor and really look around. I've been part of the FLW live coverage team, focusing on rods and line, so I've sort of had to keep tunnel vision in order to get my part done. Today I take off the blinders and can take in everything, so maybe I'll get a few more photos or notes posted as I roam.

If you haven't checked out the FLW coverage, by the way, be sure to do so. The web crew has worked steadily to keep the page really fresh with photos, videos and loads of information about all the new products and cool stuff happening at the show.

Time to head that way for the final day!

Rods & Line at ICAST

I spent a couple of hours this evening at the ICAST New Product Showcase reception, checking out new rods and fishing lines for coverage I am doing for FLW, along with at least glancing at other new stuff in the Showcase, just to see what's cool and new. I'll be posting a lot of reports about line and rods on the ICAST page on flwoutdoors.com and posting note about other cool stuff here. Stay tuned!

Tennessee River Time

Randy Haynes brought the biggest bag of the 3-day Rayovac FLW
Series Event on Kentucky Lake on the final day to win the Tennessee
River slugfest. FLW photo.

Nothing about this weekend's Rayovac FLW Series event on Kentucky Lake was a surprise. It was a slugfest, it was won on ledges, and Randy Haynes tallied the biggest three-day catch.

Ledge season brings some of the best fishing of the year to the Tennessee River, and it's time when the best of the best really shine at what they do. Everyone knows that events will be won on ledges this time of year, most pros know what to look for and what to throw, and many rotate through many of the same spots, all catching a bunch of fish. Yet the same guys do little things better than anyone else and figure out what it takes to find the best schools and fish them the right ways to bring in bigger bags than anyone else.

Randy Haynes has now won seven events with FLW, and six of them have been on the Tennessee River. He was the guy many pros would have picked to win, and he did, with more than 75 pound over three days and a tournament best catch of 27-10 on the final day.

Haynes had no single spot. In fact, he fished a different area yesterday than the first two days and he worked about 40 different ledges. He also rotated systematically through four lures. The best ledge fishermen have great instincts about when to stay and when to go and are masters at boat positioning and figuring out patterning subtleties. They see stuff no one else can quite put a finger on and figure out how to apply what the see.

This weekend's action leads into mighty important month on the Tennessee River and a serious spotlight on summer ledge fishing. The FLW Tour visits Pickwick next week and Kentucky Lake later in the season. Those two events wrap up the season, so an Angler of the Year and quite a few qualifiers for the Forrest Wood Cup will be decided on the ledges in June.

Between the dates of those two events, the Bassmaster Elite Series will visit Chickamauga Lake. Also a Tennessee River impoundment, Chickamauga has less quality ledge habitat than Pickwick or Kentucky Lake, but the current bass population is loaded with big fish.

Packing, Tracking, Writing & More

Today was one of those sorts of days where I stayed moving all day and I know I accomplished a lot, but it seemed like my wheels were spinning some of the time. Nathaniel and I leave early tomorrow morning to drive 12 hours or so to Arkansas. I needed to do a mix of packing, getting stuff in order at home, writing what I could, running errands and more. Packing, of course, included gathering trout gear for the White River.

Meanwhile, I've been keeping an eye on the FLW Tour event going on at Lake Hartwell. I'd have loved to have ridden out to the weigh-in to visit with folks and watch it live, since the site is only an hour from home, but I just couldn't make it work time-wise. I did notice that Casey Ashley expanded his lead to 9 pounds with only one day remaining. I'm happy for him. I've only met him briefly, but he seems very well-liked and respected by everyone who knows him, and it's always fun to see someone local bring it together well on home waters.

Tomorrow we'll drive to Mountain Home, Arkansas, and on Monday morning, Nathaniel will fish Dry Run creek, his favorite special regulations stream, which I've talked about quite a bit in blogs over the years. Then we'll gather in the afternoon for a couple of days trout fishing at Gaston's White River Resort. It's an annual trip with a group of writer friends and one of our favorite adventures of the year.

Suppose I ought to sleep soon!

Old Hat & Lake Murray Lessons

While sorting through basement storage containers, my wife came across my old Lake Murray Country hat. I don't specifically recall buying the hat, but I remember wearing it a lot, quite a few years ago. It could have been from a writer trip I took while I was editor of South Carolina Game & Fish, but I kind of think it goes back to a day-trip to Murray while I was college, most likely on a day when I when I was supposed to be studying or working on a paper.

Of course, when I consider how I make my living now, I'm not fully convinced that I wasn't studying. I'm not suggesting that it was good prioritization to minimize attention to classes my parents paid so much money for me to take. Only that learning on the lake probably did more to prepare me for my career as a free-lance fishing writer than learning about Japanese history, accounting, astronomy or most other stuff in the core curriculum or even most journalism classes. I definitely remember more from many days on Lake Murray than from any class I took.

There's little I don't remember about my first striper trip: I recall where we started, the lures we had tied on, the instructions of my friend who took me, the size of the first school that came up (right around the boat!), the violence of the first strike and brutish strength of the fish... That September morning outing was fundamental to my understanding of schooling striped bass.

Lake Murray also taught me about twitching a bubble gum-colored floating worm for largemouths during the spring. I believe that approach actually was popularized on Murray around the time I was in college. I know that every bait store had bunch of them and that many folks considered that THE way to target Lake Murray bass when they were around shallow buckbrush.

Then there was the November day when my friend's boat broke down one cove over from where we had launched but we happily discovered that throwing a white curly-tail grub to docks, brush and other shoreline cover would yield tremendous action from bluegills, crappie and a host of other panfish in those particular conditions.

The list of days and lessons could go on for quite a while.

A quarter century later, I'm still using those early Lake Murray lessons, and I'm still learning about the lake. With Murray being the venue of the 2014 Forrest Wood Cup, I've been working on some Lake Murray stories and actively seeking new information about the lake. I look forward to spending a few days in Lake Murray Country and doing more on-the-water learning in August. I might even wear my old hat.

Shared Joy for Co-Angler Title

I've never gotten teary eyed because an angler I didn't know and knew almost nothing about won a fishing tournament. Well, I hadn't. Until about an hour ago. But never before had I seen an angler vanish from the stage upon being announced the winner and run at full stride to embrace his mom and then return to the stage with her scurrying beside him. Never have I seen such unified delight about anyone winning any tournament -- such outwardly visible pride and joy in a mom and thankfulness in a son.

Theo Corcoran, 23, had trouble coming up with words to convey just how he felt, but in truth, he didn't need words. It was all over his face, which he wiped tears from with a weigh-in hand towel, and was equally on the face of his mom, who he said began taking him fishing when he was a little boy. The words that did come out -- youthful, unfiltered and drenched with delight -- pasted a big grin onto the face of virtually every spectator in the Century Link Center, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one in the crowd wiping a few tears.

Corcoran, who fished today with Mark Daniels, Jr., won the co-angler division of the Forrest Wood Cup by more than 7 pounds with a two-day weight of 26 pounds, 10 ounces and earned $50,000. He led the pack with 14-14 yesterday, and backed it today with 11-13, which was the best co-angler weight of today.

Today's action began with a 4-pound frog fish and then a bullet in the head for Corcoran. OK, it was a actually a 1-ounce bullet-shaped weight, but it came at high speed when Daniels swung and missed on a fish, and it immediately drew blood. When told that he was bleeding, Corcoran asked for a towel and some Superglue, did a little self-surgery and went back to fishing.

Despite youthful enthusiasm and understandable confidence after qualifying for and then winning the Forrest Wood Cup Co-Angler title, Corcoran knows he has an enormous amount to learn. Asked on stage if he'd be fishing on the pro side next year, he said he probably needed at least one more year as a co-angler. Although he feels very confident flipping shallow stuff he can look at and catching fish from the back of the boat, he admitted still having a lot to learn about structure, electronics and much more.

Like Theo Corcoran on stage, I feel somewhat at a loss for the right words to tell the story of his win and sort of wish everyone could have seen it for themselves.

Red Hot at Red River

Looking at my local 10-day forecast this morning, I realized the dates at the tail end were the days of the start of the Forrest Wood Cup. That made the championship event and my travel seem extra real and caused me to hop over to the 10-day for Shreveport, which is hosting the Cup on the Red River. Appears it'll be good and hot, which I suppose is not a huge surprise. Today's high will hit triple digits (a notable contrast from the low to mid-80s we've mostly had for highs in North Georgia this summer). All the highs throughout the Shreveport 10-day are at least in the 90s, without a lot of rain

Of course, the 46 pros who will be battling for title of champion and the $1/2 million top prize are more concerned about finding the Red's hottest big-bass bite than they are about the actual temperatures. That said, the weather, both now and during the tournament, will most likely play an important part in those answers. The color, level and temperature of the water all impact how the bass behave, and all of those are determined mostly by the weather.

When the competitors show up for official practice early next week, it will have been a few weeks since any of them have been allowed on the river, so I'm sure that even now most are thinking about how a period of true summer conditions will likely impact any patterns or fish locations they might have found during pre-practice. Depending when they visited last and how they like to operate, some will begin with what they found and try to see how fish have adjusted. Others likely used early visits only to learn navigation and to look at the river and its extensive backwaters and will begin their search for fish on the first day of practice.

As of now, the forecast for Thursday, August 15, the day the competition actually begins, is for a high of 93 and scattered thunderstorms. That'll shift, I suspect, but I'm pretty confident that it'll be good and hot on the Red River that day.

Rose Picked Pieces for Strong Day 1 Lead

Mark Rose 21-pound, 7-ounce first-day catch at the Lake Wheeler FLW Open gave him a 3-pound, 7-ounce lead. FLW photo by David A. Brown.

Based on Mark Rose's dominant first-day catch at Lake Wheeler and his history of dominance on big-river reservoirs, one would assume he had figured out a really solid pattern. Rose reported otherwise, though. He actually is moving a lot, fishing both deep and shallow, battled to collect his 21-pound, 7-ounce Day 1 limit and used several different lures to catch the fish he brought to the scales.

Most other angers' reports were similar. It seems Wheeler's bass are scattered from very shallow water to deep ledges and that shad are everywhere, making the fish difficult to pattern and to catch. Several pros reported moving frequently, mixing it up and finding little rhyme or reason in when, how or where they caught their best bass. Rose's big catch put him 3-pounds, 7 ounces ahead of local angler Blake Nick. Luke Clausen, Russ Lane and Greg Hackney are holding the next three spots in the standings after one day of competition.

Challenging Start for Jason Christie

Jason Christie - FLW Photo by Gary Mortenson.

We've all heard fishermen talk about being "snake bit" in a tournament. Well, Jason Christie started the Forrest Wood Cup spider bit -- literally. A spider, apparently a black widow, bit Christie before he left his home in Oklahoma to travel to Georgia's Lake Lanier, and the day before practice for the tournament was to begin, his leg started to swell. Not wanting to miss practice, Christie tried to ignore it, but he ended up going to a local emergency room, where they kept him for most of a day and gave him I.V. antibiotics.

Day 1 of the four-day championship event began this morning, with 46 boats blasting off at 7:00 a.m. to compete for half a million dollars. The pros in the other 45 boats had spent three days practicing on the lake, looking for groups of fish and figuring out patterns. Christie, who is fishing his fourth consecutive Forrest Wood Cup in his young career, will have to learn as he goes.

Watch the FLW Forrest Wood Cup homepage for live coverage throughout the tournament or follow @FLWFishing on Twitter.