FLW Tour - Lake Hartwell & Beaver Lake

After three events of the 2016 Walmart FLW Tour things have been going pretty good for me and I'm having my season by far!  After and 4th place finish at Lake Hartwell, then an 11th at Beaver Lake I'm sitting in 6th place in the Angler of the Year standings.  At the end of the six event season, the top 35 anglers advance to the Forrest Wood Cup, season-ending championship event.  As well, there is a $100,000 first place prize for the angler who lands on top of the AOY standings at the end of the season.  

The Lake Hartwell event started off really well when I caught a 7 pound giant early on the first day, en route to an eventual fourth place finish.  This fish helped A LOT! 

My fellow Canadian buddies - Cory and Chris Johnston have been having a great season as well.  All three of us made the top 20 cut at Hartwell, which was pretty awesome!  

While I did catch a few fish shallow each day at Lake Hartwell, I also found a couple of deep schools of spotted bass with my new Humminbird Helix machines and they paid off big time over the course of this event.  These are easy to use, bright, fast machines - I highly recommend them!  
http://www.humminbird.com/Freshwater/Lifestyle/HELIX_FW/

While I weighed mostly spotted bass at Hartwell, I was lucky to be able to mix in a few big largemouths like this one each day.  I caught my fish at Hartwell on a Jackall Dowzvido jerkbait, a Keitech swimbait and a wacky rigged Northland Impulse Dipstick https://shop.northlandtackle.com/Category/Soft_Plastics/Impulse®_Dipstick_Worm

In the end, Cory Johnston and I ended up with 4th and 8th place finishes at Lake Hartwell, so it was a pretty good week!  This was my best finish in a tour event and it earned me over $20,000!  

I warmed up for the Beaver Lake event for a couple days at Table Rock Lake in Missouri and had some awesome fishing.  In fact I managed to catch a four pound fish of each species one day, which was pretty cool.  There are not many lakes where you can do this all in one day!  The spotted bass on the far right was the biggest fish, coming in a 4.80 pounds. 

Fishing all of these different lakes usually requires some time to change tackle out from the boat and truck for each stop that we make.  In Florida, I was using all heavy tackle, baitcasting rods, etc., then we go to Lake Hartwell and I'm fishing with mostly light line and spinning rods.  It's all fun!  

At Beaver Lake I was planning to catch some big smallmouths like this in the tournament but things changed on me and I ended up catching nice largemouths, which was sort of unexpected!  Didn't matter to me as long as they were big!  

Here are a few largemouths from day two of the Beaver Lake FLW Tour event.  I have fished four tournaments on Beaver and the three limits I brought to the scales this year were the three best I have ever caught there, so it was great tournament!  Huge thank you to my Dad and my buddy Jamie Bruce who came down to prefish and fish this event on the co-angler side, it was fun guys!  

https://youtu.be/3hE862DV-YA - This link is to a video from some of the best Day Three catches at the Beaver Lake event.  I have a good one on here at the 3:45 mark.  Check it out! 

If you want to follow along on the FLW Tour, you can check out some great video, photos and fishing information on their website - www.flwfishing.com