FLW Tour co-angler recap: Potomac River
The Potomac River was the fourth stop of the FLW Tour Majors; this is an event I was looking forward to since it’s a fun area and the fishing is usually good (when the tide is right). I missed stop No. 3 at Beaver Lake trying to save up some money by fishing around the house and thankfully I was able to win a BFL on Lake Guntersville and finish in the top five in the Everstart Series Southeast event the following week to help fund the rest of the season.
I woke up at 5 a.m. Saturday to meet my practice partner in Nashville, Tenn., to help drive his rig up to the Virginia/Maryland border. It made for a long day as we arrived Saturday night sometime around 9 p.m.
Practice was about as expected as there were a good number of fish in the grass and hard cover and you could catch a lot in certain areas when the tide was right. I ended up having a couple great draws in this event and learned quite a bit about fishing tidal waters.
Day one I drew Terry Baksay from Connecticut. Terry has been around the sport a long time and I was eager to fish with someone with a lot of knowledge of the river and bass fishing in general. The game plan was to get a limit in the grass and then go looking for better fish. Needless to say the fish he had located in practice either moved or shut down; we both struggled to catch fish that met the 15-inch length limit. Terry was more power fishing so I tried a number of different things to get bit and only had one small keeper in the livewell around 11 a.m. At that point I decided to switch to a Senko and was able to catch seven keepers on the day (five on a Senko) and then upgraded one time with a Spro frog. Terry struggled and only weighed in three fish although he had a few fish get off. I was blessed to get seven bites behind him and weighed in just under 13 pounds and was in 23rd place. Terry and I had a blast on the water and although the fishing was tough the day flew by.
On day two I drew Blake Nick from Alabama who is a second-year pro on the FLW Tour. Blake had a decent day one and was looking into moving up into the money cut and hopefully the top 20. The bite on day two seemed to be better than the first day as my pro had a quick limit fishing isolated targets which made it tough to catch anything behind him. I struggled and had only six bites throughout the day; I managed three fish on a crankbait and another three flipping a light-rigged Paca Craw around any grass and cover. Blake was a great angler, just tough to fish behind since he was either fishing very fast or picking apart cover. I managed to weigh in just shy of 10 pounds and finished the tournament in 38th place. All in all it was another great experience and I learned a lot about fishing tidal waters. Thanks for reading, Casey. www.caseymartinfishing.com.