From the Bass Pro Tour
Lake Murray provided the setting for the continuation of a fishing rivalry to close out its latest Bass Pro Tour event.
Drew Gill and Jacob Wheeler have combined for multiple titles on the circuit and were 1-2 in last year’s Fishing Clash Angler of the Year race.
On Sunday, they once again separated themselves from the Championship Round field of the PowerStop Brakes Stage 3 event in the quest for the $150,000 grand prize.
A stressful third period saw Gill fail to catch a scorable bass during the final 89 minutes. However, his total of 58 pounds, 2 ounces edged out Wheeler to earn Gill his second Bass Pro Tour victory in 10 career events and fourth across BPT over the past 13 months.
“If you had told me, ‘Hey, last hour and a half, you’re not going to catch a bass. Do you think Wheeler is going to catch 4 pounds?’ I would have been like, ‘Absolutely, he is,’” Gill said with a chuckle. “And [the bite] just died for both of us.”
Gill rode an emotional roller coaster not just for the final period but the entire Championship Round. When he launched his boat Sunday morning, he admitted he didn’t like his chances of winning, as he figured the overcast, cool conditions would hurt his afternoon dock pattern.
“I knew the conditions were going to shoot my dock bite, and to be honest, I didn’t think I could do 45 (pounds) in the first period to make up for that,” he said.
While Gill’s prediction about a slower afternoon bite proved correct, he made up for it with his two greatest strengths – a well-thought-out, math-based strategy and his mastery of forward-facing sonar.
Gill used the first period each day to target bass that were chasing blueback herring in ditches. He fished deeper than most other anglers, catching his fish in 28-35 feet of water, where some related to stumps on the bottom and others suspended. He believes those bass weren’t getting as much pressure as the shallower populations other anglers targeted with forward-facing sonar, allowing him to fool a higher percentage of them into biting.
“With a lake like Murray that has so many bass in it, your focal point when you’re using ‘Scope should always be bite percentage,” Gill explained. “You’re always going to be able to put a bait in front of a bass. You’re not going to beat other people by putting a bait in front of more bass than they are. You’re going to beat other people by dialing your deal as best you can and ideally finding a population that other people aren’t pressuring. And I fished for them deeper than anybody else did this week.”
Wielding a 4-inch minnow on a 1/4-ounce jig head with a 1/0 hook, Gill used a pair of flurries to stack weight on SCORETRACKER® in a hurry. In one 37-minute window, he boated six bass totaling nearly 25 pounds. Then, toward the end of Period 1, he added four more for 11-8 within 23 minutes.
He credited the overnight switch to daylight savings time that put the field on the water an hour earlier than previously fished the rest of the week, extending his bite window.
“(The bite) kind of went away around 9 a.m. all week,” Gill said. “But because of the time change, we got out there an hour earlier, and so that 9 a.m. became today’s 10 a.m. So, without the time change, I don’t win this tournament.”
Gill’s first-period total of 45-7 led Wheeler by 9-6 and put him nearly 27 pounds clear of everyone else. At that point, even though he wasn’t overly optimistic about skipping docks, he started to believe he could pull off the win.
“The two days when I needed to catch shallow fish, I caught like 17 pounds both days and shook them off the rest of the day,” Gill said. “I thought no way, even though the conditions were worse, do I catch any less than 20 pounds.”
The bass had other plans. After locking up his forward-facing sonar unit, Gill went more than two hours without boating a scorable bass. Meanwhile, Wheeler steadily added to his total. He passed Gill and built a lead of more than six pounds.
Finally, with less than 10 minutes left in Period 2, Gill connected with his most important bass of the day. Twice, he skipped his Big Bite Baits Nekorama, which he paired with a No. 1 straight-shank hook and 1/16-ounce Bass Pro Shops tungsten nail weight, under the same dock, got bit and failed to hook up. On the third try, he let the fish devour his bait a tad longer, then connected with a five-pound, one ounce catch.
“That 5-pounder was a real turning point in my day,” Gill said. “Because it kind of clued me in to the deal that allowed me to get a handful of bites, which was anywhere I had a little, round, shallow point. If there was a dock on the side of it and under it was like 4 to 7 feet, I knew it was going to be pretty high percentage. Of my five scorable bites I got the rest of the day, four of them were on that deal. … They wanted to be on that break, that depth break, anyways, and if you had that depth break occur right under a dock, it just kind of doubled the percentage of that dock having a fish.”
Armed with that information, Gill added three more bass for 7-10 early in the third period, not only retaking the lead but extending his advantage over Wheeler to more than six pounds. That included a 3-pounder that he somehow landed despite having his line wrapped around the motor of a docked boat and the dock’s ladder.
“I don’t land that fish, I don’t win this tournament,” Gill said. “Because of a couple very fortunate turns of events, we got it done.”
In the end, holding off the No. 1-ranked angler in the world made this win even more memorable. Gill seems to be making a habit of winning in stressful fashion, as he had to weather a similarly slow final period in his first BPT victory, which came on the Chowan River last June.
“At Chowan, I got chased within a handful of pounds by Michael Neal, and this one, by Wheeler,” Gill said. “Those are two guys that I have tremendous respect for their fishing abilities, and they’re two guys that you don’t want to have chasing you. And it was something where I did not see that coming, and I was very gratified by the fact that I was able to hold my ground enough to steady this one out.”
Prosperity native Anthony Gagliardi finished in 15th place.
