Reflecting back on it, winning the St. Croix Bassmaster Open at Lake St. Clair presented by SEVIIN was pretty special for me. Getting an Opens win as a boater was pretty cool. I had won a couple of co-angler titles before I qualified for the Bassmaster Elite Series in 2021, so coming back and getting a title as a boater was awesome.
Just the fact that there were that many anglers on St. Clair that week — more than 220 boats — and I won the tournament in an area that had so much pressure every single day was crazy.
The way that lake fishes, there isn’t a spot on the spot. You find an area and you have to out fish everyone in that area to do well. It was pretty neat to know the stuff I found and the stuff I ended up winning on, other people fished as well, and I essentially out fished everyone there. That was definitely the thing that stood out the most about the week. It sort of suits my style.
There were several little adjustments I made fishing in the crowd that really helped me dial in the bite.
The most important adjustment was transitioning from bottom baits to a Strike King Baby Z Too on a jighead. I was using the Baby Z Too overall, but I started the week using it on a drop shot. During practice, those smallmouth weren’t keyed into the minnow like they were a lot of other baits. They like to eat on the bottom out there, especially with how shallow they were. I was only in 8 to 12 feet of water.
The minnow wasn’t the deal for me in practice. I could get fish to follow it, but they wouldn’t commit. But that bite got a lot better during the actual tournament, and I think that was mostly due to the fishing pressure.
Those fish had seen millions of drop shots and Ned rigs. I had so many nice smallmouth follow the drop shot to the bottom Day 1 and not eat it. I also lost a couple on a drop shot, and I wasn’t really sure why I was losing them. They were just really finicky. At that point, I knew something had to change. I wasn’t going to catch them that day if I kept beating their heads in with a drop shot.
The second adjustment I made was to hunker down in three zones. If I got outside of these 100- and 200-yard stretches, I could catch them, but it was never the quality I needed. If I hunkered down in one of those areas, let it rest for an hour, and came back, instead of trying to fish new water, I could catch the bigger smallies. Fishing new water is usually the right thing to do, but in this tournament, there wasn’t much new water to find with how many anglers were on the water.
When I started seeing bass, I also turned my trolling motor speed down to low just because a lot of these fish would really sneak up on you. They were curious about the boat in that shallow water. If you were flying up to a bass, by the time you casted at that fish, the boat had already drifted to within 50 feet of that bass. Those bass are so smart that if you didn’t catch them from a distance away, they weren’t going to bite.
On the final day of that tournament, I had lost a really big smallmouth and I still had a 4-pounder in the livewell. If I had landed that bass, it would have sent me over 25 pounds for the day at that point. Obviously, entering the day in second place, you wonder how much that was going to hurt. About 10 minutes later, I ran back to one of my other areas and caught a 5 1/2-pounder.
That moment was when I thought I had a chance to win the whole thing and secure my spot in the 2025 Bass Pro Shops Bassmaster Classic at Lake Ray Roberts.
