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August 13, 2017 by Curtis Niedermier and Matt Pace
Dialing in on surface activity – or near-surface activity – for bass that were chasing blueback herring seemed to be the key to success at the 2017 Forrest Wood Cup on Lake Murray. Late-summer largemouths were often relating to brush or cane. Anglers either “called them up” with jumbo walking plugs or capitalized on visible surface activity to get bit.
Here’s what the top 10 threw to make it happen.
1. Tournament champion Justin Atkins targeted herring-eating bass and caught all 15 of his weigh-in keepers on one bait: a chrome ima Little Stick 135. On day three, he actually lost the Little Stik that he’d used on days one and two, and he unwrapped a new one to finish out his title run.
2. Travis Fox came up a little shy in his bid for a Cup victory. Unlike many others who played the open-water topwater game, he wasn’t keying on brush, but instead fished points. For the first two days he relied mostly on an ima Little Stick 135 in the American shad color with the stock hooks swapped out to VMC trebles. When the fish refused to bite it on day three, he caught his biggest fish with a Strike King Sexy Spoon. Fox was turned onto the spoon by a keen observation at a tackle shop. Essentially, there were so many spoons in the store that he figured they had to be productive baits on Murray. He was right. His other change on the final day was to swap the Little Stik for a Storm Arashi Top Walker in ghost pearl shad.
3. Brandon Cobb, one of the in-state favorites, made his third consecutive Cup top 10 this week with a variety of baits. His primary tool was a Yo-Zuri Hydro Pencil, which is actually an inshore walking plug, but he replaced the stock saltwater hooks with lighter-wire freshwater models. On the final day, he added a Yo-Zuri 3DB Pencil in prism ghost shad, and wound up catching most of his keepers on a Zoom Super Fluke in a shad pattern with glitter. A last-ditch effort on day three to fill his limit with a drop-shot produced only a catfish.
4. Bryan Thrift played the topwater game with a Paycheck Baits The One pencil popper, but he did a lot of damage with a 10-inch Texas-rigged worm fished in brush piles. On the final day, he caught three keepers on a Damiki Finesse Miki rigged on a shaky head.
