Eufaula’s Offshore Bite Could be Hot

Breaking down stop No. 4 of the 2015 Walmart FLW Tour

When the Walmart FLW Tour stopped at Lake Eufaula in 2013, Randy Haynes plied a handful of offshore spots for his winning limits, and he did it without much company. That figures to change this time around as the offshore pattern will be on everyone’s radar when the fourth stop of the 2015 Tour kicks off on Lake Eufaula on Thursday in an event presented by Quaker State.

“I think it’s going to be an offshore deal,” opines Quaker State pro Scott Canterbury, who has won in FLW competition on Eufaula in the past. “You can definitely catch fish shallow, and there will be a lot of checks cashed shallow, but I don’t know that you can win it that way. You can win fishing deep because you have fish coming to you. If you catch two or three up shallow those fish are gone. If you catch two or three out deep there should be a few more there the next day.”

Eufaula’s Quirks

Eufaula isn’t a standard Tennessee River-style ledge lake with huge schools and lots of current, but that doesn’t mean the offshore bite is lacking. In fact, the “Bass Fishing Capital of the World” of years gone by is the “original ledge lake” in Jason Lambert’s estimation and the place where Bobby Padgett pioneered the Preacher Jig that reemerged with such force in 2014.

The lack of consistently strong current in Eufaula is actually key to the entire setup of the reservoir. Unlike in reservoirs with steady current, Eufaula’s bass do not concentrate in predictable areas, old standing timber remains in the lake and local anglers have placed hundreds of brush piles without that cover being washed away in the flows.

“You’ll be looking for one brush pile and find three of them while you’re looking for it,” says Haynes, by way of illustrating how much wood cover there is in the lake.

Though it is possible to graph fish on Eufaula, Lambert, the 2014 FLW Tour Rookie of the Year, explains that because so many of the offshore spots on Eufaula are fairly shallow, it would be hard to just idle around watching the graph and find fish.

“A lot of the fish there are offshore in 6 feet of water,” he says. “That helps guys who don’t like to idle in practice, and it might hurt the guys who idle a lot.”

The scattered fish and plentiful cover mean that someone on the shallow offshore pattern might fish 40 spots in a day looking to catch a fish or two off of each brush pile. Though it wouldn’t be a surprise to see someone excel fishing 12 feet deep or deeper, even that person will likely need more than one or two places to lean on during the event.

Of course, just because Eufaula lacks consistent current doesn’t mean that current can’t be a game-changer. If could, if conditions line up just right.

“A day with current can be big,” says Lambert. “If it all lines up, you can smash ’em.”