MACOMB COUNTY, Mich. — The term “road hunting” is usually associated with whitetail deer. It’s illegal. It’s basically driving a vehicle along a dirt road until you see a deer, then shooting a rifle from the vehicle.
There’s another entirely legal form of “road hunting” going on for smallmouth bass on Lake St. Clair in the AFTCO Bassmaster Elite Series Tournament here this week. And Joey Cifuentes III is good at it. After Day 2, the 34-year-old Elite Series rookie from Clinton, Ark., is in second place with a total of 46 pounds, 10 ounces.
“I’m not fishing for a big school of fish,” Cifuentes said. “I troll for hundreds and hundreds of yards before I see a fish (on forward-facing sonar). When they’re there, there’s a lot of (yellow) perch, there’s a lot of bait they’re eating on. It’s just perfect.”
You drive around the 430-square-mile shallow bowl of a lake, until you spot your target on sonar, then you take your shot. In this case, it’s a dropshot with a Berkley Maxscent 3.6-inch brown back color Flat Worm.
In this tournament, where all 102 anglers have weighed a 5-bass limit both days, it’s obviously quality that puts you at the top of the leaderboard. Cifuentes, who was fifth on Day 1 with 22-10, now trails leader Taku Ito (47-4) by only 10 ounces. The top three leaders on Day 1 – Shane LeHew, Jason Christie and Bryan Schmidt – fell out of the top 10 on Day 2. Ito was 14th on Day 1. There’s a lot of jumbling in the standings where 33 anglers topped 20 pounds on Day 1 and 48 did it Friday.
Cifuentes has competed in three tournaments in other circuits on Lake St. Clair. But the phrase “past history doesn’t guarantee future success” applies to this place like no other.
“I checked some of my old history waypoints, but the place I just stumbled across had a lot better quality,” Cifuentes said. “It’s all new fish.”
And he’s going to keep it that way. Cifuentes said he doesn’t plan to fish anywhere Saturday where he caught fish Friday.
“Because this place is so vast and there’s no contour, they could be anywhere,” he said. “It all depends on where the bait is. I’m catching them in a new place that I’ve never fished in my life.”
Most of the field is dropshotting with various baits. Cifuentes is keeping it very simple, not experimenting with different ones, relying strictly on the Berkley Flat Worm. He knows he could hook smallmouth by employing different methods, but the dropshot is insurance for landing them after the bite.
“If I threw a swimbait, which they would eat, I have a way better chance of losing them,” Cifuentes said. “You’re going to lose more fish on a Ned rig and a swimbait. The dropshot is so good because you keep fish on. You don’t lose many fish.”
When Cifuentes won his second-ever Elite Series tournament at Georgia’s Lake Seminole on Feb. 26, he noted how much he was looking forward to this season-ending, three-tournament northern swing, where smallmouth bass would be the primary target. After two days at Lake St. Clair, he’s proving his point.
