Pleased with the prefishing day

Published 12:45 am Thursday, March 5, 2020

GUNTERSVILLE, Alabama — Two days before the 50th annual Bassmaster Classic, one of the 53 bass anglers in the field was tight-lipped — as bass anglers are wont to be — about his final practice day Wednesday at Lake Guntersville.

Caleb Sumrall drove his Xpress X21 Pro Series boat on the boat trailer behind his Toyota Tundra a little after 3 p.m. and a friend drove it up the ramp at Civitan Park to ready it for the 1:20 hour ride back to Classic headquarters in Birmingham, The New Iberia Bassmaster Elite pro will follow that routine on the competition days Friday, Saturday and, hopefully, Sunday.

Sumrall was pleased, for the most part, with his day of prefishing, obviously. There was much more sustenance to it, apparently, than the other three official practice days Feb. 28-29 and March 1.

“Oh, today was a better day. (But) I still don’t have what I would have liked to have found,” he said.

How good was it? A Kalamazoo, Michigan, outdoorsman who rode as his marshal believed it was pretty good.

“I think he’s going to do well. He’s confident,” Daryl DeVries  said after he exited the boat in the busy parking lot.

Seeing is believing.

“He caught a good handful of fish, five, six, seven. He got into a couple good spots” and got out of them as quickly as possible, DeVries said, familiar with the way bass anglers abandon a potential hotspot to avoid sticking bass.

“He had one good one, probably a 5 ¾-pounder, and a couple of 4s,” said the marshal who has served in that role for three straight Classics.

The Michigan man was impressed.

“Oh, he’s a very talented fisherman. I was very impressed with everything from his boat handling to electronics and that’s on practice day. I don’t think he showed his stuff,” he said.

DeVries said he wouldn’t be surprised if the Louisiana bass pro had up to 20 pounds on a good day and perhaps 15 to 17 pounds otherwise.

Sumrall, 32, on the verge of competing in his second Classic in his third year on the Bassmaster Elite Series, wondered aloud about the weather conditions and the effect on bass fishing. It was warm and, unlike the heavy rains between Guntersville and Birmingham, at the most drizzling.

However, the weather is forecast to change drastically. Friday will dawn much colder in the post-cold front period and it could be near freezing at takeoff time Saturday from Civitan Park.

“It’s going to be interesting whether they bite or not. The conditions are going to change a lot. It’s going to affect them, move them, that’s for sure,” he said.

While he navigated around specifics, again, as bass anglers are wont to do, he did say the bites came on moving baits as opposed to soft plastics. And while he moved around a lot, the bite wasn’t that consisten.

“I had bites in mid-morning and bites after lunch,” he said.