Americana Outdoors E-Magazine - December 2018

It’s easy to get dejected when you come so close to winning but come up just short in the end. War- ren went on to state that they don’t plan on letting this one loss effect the rest of their season, “It’s going to happen eventually. We’ll get a win here in the next couple.”

Weights at the top of the leaderboard were ex- tremely close. The top three teams were separat- ed by only 0.28 lbs. Finishing just 0.13 lbs behind first were Eric Lampkin and Garrett Warren from Snead State Community College. They flipped heavy mats to total 27.49 lbs of bass. “We’re flip- ping a flipping stick obviously, 65 lb test braid. We rotate a little bit between a 1 &1/4 oz weight and a 1 & 1/2 oz weight. Flipping a beaver style bait or a craw. Just flip it in there, they’ll hit it as soon as it comes through the mat,” said Lampkin. Flipping matted grass was not a common pattern we heard on Lake Dardanelle this week, so it is likely this duo was fishing for less pressured fish. Given that roughly 200 boats competed in this tournament, low pressured areas were very key.

Representing East Texas Baptist University, Chad Poulsen and Dustin Pearcy claimed 3rd place. The duo weighed in 14.85 lbs of Lake Dardanelle bass on this rainy Saturday. Combined with yesterday’s weight, the Texas based anglers tallied 27.34 lbs for two days. Bites came early and often for Poulsen and Pearcy today. “We started out throwing re- action baits. It was on a shad kind of deal. We had our limit by about 8:30,” explained Poulsen. Once they managed a decent limit, the gameplan was to move towards the bank and target shallow wood with jigs. This proved to be a critical deci- sion. “Once we just started hitting those laydowns, I mean, we knocked out I want to say a 4.5 yester- day, and a 3.5 today,” said Pearcy. Finding ways to catch four plus pound fish was an instant path to success this week. Numerous limits of 10 pounds came to the scales. Catching one difference mak- er proved to be enough to separate a team from the rest of the pack. Lake Dardanelle provided a true challenge the past two days. Leading up to this event many anglers warned of the potential for these fish to be there one day and gone the next. One look at the lead- erboard shows this to be true for this tournament. All three of the top teams from day one dropped

By having a pattern dialed in, Snead State Com- munity College, currently ranked 130th, was around the fish all week. When the foul weather blew in, they too were near the fish when they de- cided to bite. “Today it was a tough morning. Real slow morning, only had two fish at 11 o’clock. Right before that front blew in we just started catch- ing them. Caught a four pounder, and that really changed the momentum for us,” said Lampkin. Like the 1st place team in front of them, Lampkin and Warren are both freshmen. Being new to the college fishing scene they traveled to Lake Darda- nelle both excited and confident. “We were real- ly looking forward to it. We thought we had just as good as odds as anybody else. We work just as hard. We fish just as much, and we put in our time,” explained Warren.