FORT WORTH – With a new friend at his side, Caleb Sumrall is ready to take on Lake Ray Roberts when the 2025 Bassmaster Classic gets underway on March 21.

Sumrall more or less kept the friend at a distance for a while, then within arm’s reach starting around 2020, two years after getting into the Bassmaster Elite Series. His peers with friends like his often caught more bass over the next few years and that wound up chafing the lifelong, accomplished, diehard puncher’s rear end.

The New Iberia pro bass angler plans to lean on his new friend – forward facing sonar – from Day 1 beginning Friday to, hopefully, Championship Sunday. He got comfortable enough with forward facing sonar to end the 2024 campaign on a high note catching smallies in New York state for a 13th-place finish on the St. Lawrence River as well as a clutch 9th-place showing in the regular-season finale on the St. Lawrence River that punched his ticket to the Classic. Nevertheless, he did resort to a jig-and-pig, which gave him a 6-pound largemouth bass in one of those tournaments.

“It felt good to have that in the wheelhouse,” Sumrall said during a bassu.tv video aired by Bass University Live in January.

The 37-year-old outdoorsman, who spent this past offseason as a charter boat captain loading the boat with speckled trout and redfish up to the first week of January in and around Vermilion Bay, relishes the fact he has a new weapon in his bass fishing arsenal when he takes on the 25,600-acre impoundment built in 1987. It’ll be his fourth Classic appearance since he joined the Elites in 2018.

“Coming into this year I knew I had some pressure to do better … I knew I had to make adjustments to how I fish, how I approach the year,” Sumrall said during the bassu.tv show.

He first installed forward facing sonar in 2020 but didn’t get serious about it until a few years later when an Elite angler caught a couple 5-pound class bass around him while Live Scoping. That was the handwriting on the wall, Sumrall confided.

“I didn’t want to be known as a one-dimensional angler,” he said about ramping up his ’Scopin’ skills. “I don’t want to be the king of ’scoping. … but I want to keep my job.”

Winning the Classic looms as his “job” at hand this week at Lake Ray Roberts, approximately one hour north of Fort Worth. Sixty other Elites aim to hoist that coveted trophy, plus collect $300,000 of the $1 million purse, after the final weigh-in on Sunday.

Sumrall’s been looking forward to the challenge ever since he qualified for what is billed as the world series of bass fishing. Before last Friday’s first official day of practice, however, he never ventured to the lake created along Elm Fork of the Trinity River. It’s known for giving up 4- to 6-pound bass but can be fickle at times, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department fisheries biologist Dan Bennett.

“It’s not a lake where you can just drop the trolling motor on any random bank and expect to catch ’em. You’ve got to put your time in to find the best areas,” Bennett told the Beaumont Enterprise in a story posted March 13.

Sumrall, 73rd in this year’s Angler of the Year standings after two Florida tournaments so far in 2025, didn’t tow his Xpress X21 Pro here before the cutoff period began for the Classic.

“I never got any prefish in. I’ll tell you a funny story. My entire career, now, I’m just opposed to prefishing. I haven’t done it. I don’t think I have done it for any one event,” he said during the bassu.tv video, noting that would be a hefty expense, which means with two children – Clelie and Axel – such ventures are cost prohibitive.

“I tell you one thing, I do my research on the back end to try to make up for it. I do major map studies,” he said, emphasizing the third-to-last word in the second sentence. “I wish I could get at least one day of running around, just to kind of see the place, maybe. But, no, I didn’t get to do it and from what I understand, that one’s one I should have with all the standing timber.

“I think I’ll be all right there. I’ve got a lot of experience at Toledo (Toledo Bend) around that time of year. Rayburn (Lake Sam Rayburn) as well. I’m not saying it’ll fish like either of those lakes at all. I understand it’s a totally different system. But as far as the time of year and what they should be doing and where they should be sitting, I think it (familiarity with Toledo Bend, where he guided for a while, and Lake Sam Rayburn during March) will help a lot.”

His previous three Classic appearances ended with a 16th at South Carolina’s Lake Hartwell in 2022, a 26th at Lake Guntersville in 2020 and a 49th in his first-ever Classic at Lake Hartwell in 2018. He knew before and after each of them the only reason to be in it is to win it.

So he’s going in with a winner-take-all attitude on Lake Ray Roberts.

“Nothing else matters but winning. That would be great,” Sumrall said earlier this year in The Daily Iberian.

“It will be my fourth Classic. It’s got some good ones but it’s tough fishing. I don’t think it will be a slugfest,” he said about Lake Ray Roberts.

He’s certainly been learning the intricacies of forward facing sonar, which adds to his game. Three-pound blue catfish and carp continue at times to resemble bass on the screen (he caught 10 cats in one recent tournament).

A veteran Lake Ray Roberts fishing guide from Texas believes several patterns will be in play at this week’s Classic. Danny Golden of nearby Justin believes the winning three-day total could be in the upper 50s, possibly the low 60s.

“Whoever wins this deal is going to be doing both – fishing offshore (with forward facing sonar) and shallow,” Golden said recently. “The lake is beginning to warm up and they should be full into the spawn by the time the tournament gets started – unless we have some kind of crazy cold front come through between now and then.”

Chris Zaldain of Fort Worth, who has a storied pro bass fishing career behind him and is fishing this week’s Classic, has a gut feeling it’s going to take much more weight to win it.

“I think it’ll take 73-75 pounds. The guy who wins will have over 30 pounds one day, 18 pounds on another and then another solid day in the mid-20s,” the veteran recently told the Beaumont Enterprise.

Sumrall hopes he has what it takes now that he can rely on a new friend as well as his punchin’ prowess.