Brandon Cobb weighed 19 pounds, 6 ounces, to take the Day 1 lead at the Guaranteed Rate Elite at Chickamauga Lake. However, don’t let that weight deceive you. It wasn’t easy for Cobb or any of the other 84 anglers in this tournament. Only 29 five-bass limits were brought to the scales.
“It was not an easy day,” said the 30-year-old Greenwood, S.C., angler. “I got six bites and two of them happened to be six-pounders.”
Cobb’s big bass weighed 6-4. Ed Loughran III took big bass honors for the day with a 6-9, but he had only one other bass to go with it.
“I caught that fish on my third cast this morning,” said Loughran, who is in 39th place with 8-10. “That fish weighed more than all the keepers I caught during practice.”
That was the word yesterday after three days of practice, that this would be the toughest tournament of the season. The Day 1 weigh-in made believers of any doubters. Sixteen anglers weighed one fish or less.