Points winners pave way to championship
Pugh wins Eastern Division in tiebreaker, Morehead wins Central Division by landslide in EverStart Series
Editor’s note: A profile of the points winners from the Northern and Western divisions will be posted Tuesday at FLWOutdoors.com.
The EverStart Series standings races were a veritable mixed bag of finishes in 2004, with two of four divisions representing either end of the spectrum.
The race for the top was a nail-biter in the Eastern Division, where the outcome ultimately came down to a tiebreaker. By contrast, the Central Division leader won by a landslide.
Close call in Eastern Division
The fiercest points race occurred in the Eastern Division between Pedigree pro Greg Pugh of Cullman, Ala., and Koby Kreiger of Okeechobee, Fla.
Both anglers are at the top of their game anytime fish are on bed. Since two of the four Eastern Division tournaments were held during the spawn (Santee Cooper and Eufaula), it’s no surprise that the points race came down to a 717-point tie between Pugh and Kreiger.
In the end the points tie was broken by total weight for the season, which gave Pugh the points title.
“I feel it’s an awesome accomplishment,” Pugh said. “It’s an honor to fish against the caliber fishermen we have out here and come out on top. As far as the tiebreaker, that was a blessing.”
Pugh’s year started with a 68th-place, below-par finish at Okeechobee, and thoughts of winning the points race were nonexistent.
His season turnaround came at Eufaula when a spun boat propeller hub became a blessing in disguise. On the first day of the Eufaula EverStart, Pugh was actually planning to run some 100 miles one way to Lake Seminole to catch spawning bass.
“I had only seen a few cruising fish on Eufaula during practice,” Pugh recalled. “Seminole is usually ahead of Eufaula in terms of the spawn, so I was headed down there to see what I could find.”
But just a few miles shy of reaching the Lake Eufaula lock and dam, Pugh’s prop spun a hub. He put his spare on, but it did not provide the speed he needed to get to Seminole.
“My spare would run about 10 mph slower and I needed all the speed I could get if I was going to Seminole,” he said. “So I took it as a sign from the good Lord that I was meant to fish in Eufaula – and he was right.”
Pugh caught the beginning wave of the spawn on Eufaula and rode it to a third-place finish.
At Santee Cooper, Pugh sight-fished his way to another third-place finish, but this time he fished a waning spawn.
“The spawn was pretty much over at Santee,” he said. “There were a few fish still left in this one area and with a new moon coming on a few more would filter in there everyday. It was tough though; the fish were bedding real deep and they were extremely hard to see. It was the hardest sight fishing I’ve ever done.”
With the final event being held on Lake Guntersville near his home in Alabama, Pugh was gunning for a grand finale that would guarantee him the points title.
Guntersville was not the top-10 finish he was hoping for, but he managed a respectable 13th place on the knowledge of deep cranking Guntersville’s ledges.
“The EverStarts were really a stay-in-one-area-and-grind-it-out kind of year for me,” Pugh said. “Instead of running around and covering a lot of water during the events, I would settle into an area for the entire tournament and keep finding new ways to catch the fish.”
Dominant leader emerges from Central Division
Stratos pro Dan Morehead of Paducah, Ky., won the Central Division points title with 760 points, giving him a wide 47-point margin over second place.
The 2004 Central Division points title was a nice complement to Morehead’s 2003 Wal-Mart FLW Tour Angler of the Year title and is proof that Morehead is still fishing consistently.
“Obviously, the prestige is with the FLW Tour Angler of the Year,” Morehead said. “But I’m proud to win the Central points, especially since I had such a crummy start to my 2004 season.”
Indeed, Morehead’s 2004 season was headed for disaster after his first two FLW events where he posted 188th- and 118th-place showings.
“What really makes me feel good about this year is that despite such a terrible start, I rallied back to 21st in the points in FLW and first in the Central EverStarts,” he noted. “Sometimes when you stumble out of the blocks it’s hard to get things turned around, but I did it.”
Morehead’s Central EverStarts finishes started with a 26th-place at Sam Rayburn Reservoir. Then he finished second at Pickwick Lake.
Morehead finished second again at the Red River, missing the win in a painful tiebreaker to Scott Rook of Little Rock, Ark.
“Those two tournaments – Pickwick and the Red River – were really important to my season from a confidence standpoint because in both events I was making really long runs which involved locking,” Morehead said. “When making those kind of long runs and locking for four days in a row at each event, there was a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong. But my equipment performed flawlessly and I executed perfectly, which really helped restore a lot of my overall confidence for the year.”
By the last EverStart tournament, Morehead was firmly entrenched in the points lead and headed to his home waters of Kentucky Lake to finish off the season.
A 14th-place finish at Kentucky Lake gave him the points title going away.
“With so many good fishermen out here today, it’s a hard thing to do, especially in just four tournaments, you just can’t afford to slip up,” he added. “So I’m real happy about it.”