"The Pumpback" A photo of “The Pumpback” from 1968. "The Pumpback today..." A view from the kayak of “The Pumpback” from Saturday during the event. Bonus Event – OKA Eastern Road Runner Fished the OKA (Oklahoma Kayak Anglers) event this weekend, this was their Eastern Road Runner and the eligible lakes were Eucha (pronounced Oochie), Spavinaw, and The Pumpback (AKA: W.R. Holway Lake, AKA Chimney Rock Lake)   I took a day to pre-fish on Eucha a little bit and I covered several miles of shoreline without a bite one, visibility was terrible at only about 4 inches. I heard that ..read more

Well I decided to look further into my performance, and because of that I wanted to share that journey with you all in case you have issues with how to learn from a poor finish or even a good one. This was definitely not a good finish. I’m sharing my personal assessment of my performance based on some factors that I deemed important. Overall, I rate this performance as Poor or Very Poor. This is not only based on my final placing in the event, but also many other problems that led to that which I will discuss below. The first factor I’ll talk about is decision making. I rated this just unde ..read more

6th Place in the first event of 2023 with NSKA My best fish of the day 20.25 inches Kayak Bass Tournament season is officially back! Yesterday I fished my first event of the season with Natural State Kayak Anglers on Table Rock Lake (West). Here’s how it went down….   First off I tried to start getting ready a few days before hand, instead of my usual, just the night before. I had been doing some research on trends for Table Rock at this time of year. Watching YouTube videos and looking at past tournament records to get an idea of what to expect, and some possible patterns ..read more

Last weekend I fished the All American Kayak Classic for the second time. Last year I had mechanical issues and wasn’t able to finish out my limit but still managed 39th out of 167. This year I was really excited to get back to this event for some retribution. The AAKC last year was my first time fishing Truman lake, and I really wished I had more time to learn it then. Even though my score didn’t reflect it I really did enjoy the event and Truman lake last year. This year I got to go down for 2 full days of practice, and decided to focus on one of the main river arms and the point where i ..read more

Stop number 5 for the Natural State Kayak Anglers took us back to Table Rock, but we were not given the entire lake to fish this time. The boundary for this event was anything below the Shell Knob bridge including the White and Kings Rivers. I chose the Kings river hoping it would be dirtier than the White with the recent rain and flooding we’ve had.   The water turned out to be much clearer than I expected but that was ok too, adjust and move on, and fish the conditions you’re given. I won last year in the same area I was fishing punching the mats and catching fish that were eati ..read more

 949. BWhile I keep thinking my season is over for the year, at least tournament-wise. I keep finding events to fish. I’ve got two more events coming in the next two weekends now, and there’s another event that I may fish in December as well. But technically it’s still the off-season, as the majority of the trails have wound down, and it’s now time to start prepping for next year. I typically like to break my off-season into a few categories.  1. Restocking gear and prepping tackle for next season –  This means taking inventory of everything that I have, making sure to get an ..read more

The Last Hoorah I fished my last event for the 2022 season. It was a MoYak Winter Series event on Table Rock Lake in Missouri. The starting air temperature was 21 degrees, and the water temperature was only 48 that morning. The wind increased over time and it was pretty intense near the end of the day. That being said I layered up and actually had to take some layers off during the day to keep from overheating. I was actually anticipating getting topwater bites despite the weather, but I barely gave it a chance, and by the time the water had warmed up to a good temperature for that I had alrea ..read more

As promised, here is my late fall article about where I find bass and how I catch them as the water continues to cool down as we slip closer to winter and frigid temperatures.   This pick 6 is for the later part of fall when the water has gotten too cold for topwater fishing and everything starts to really cool off.   As water temperatures dip down into the mid 60’s and even the 50’s fishing actually starts to get really good. The only problem we have is that this can really be a short period in our area. Here in the Ozarks it tends to go from Summer to Winter in a flash.   Fo ..read more

I always love fishing the Hobie BOS events, and bonus when they come to Broken Bow, as I grew up just 12 miles from there in Idabel, Oklahoma. You might assume that I’d have a lot of experience on Broken Bow Lake, but I didn’t fish it that much as a child, and most of my fishing knowledge came after I had moved away from the area too. Last year I placed 11th at this event, and I had high hopes of doing even better this time.   I had decided with the gas prices that I would stay in the primitive campsite up the river and rough it for 4 days. That would give me two days to practice and t ..read more

Just finished up the next to last event of the year for NSKA, Southern Table Rock. Basically everything in the White and Kings River below the Shell Knob bridge is the boundaries. I prefished with Kyle Long in a really good area, and had a sneaking suspicion it was too good, and may be a false positive. I fished a lot of different baits in practice and if I caught a fish over 17” or saw one attack or basically came in contact with a decent fish I would put that rod away for the day, and try another. I wound up putting up 6 rods and had a phenomenal fishing day.   The area I fished up the ..read more