Brandon Gray knows deep fish – it’s the shallow ones that give hm problems. But he should be right in his element as the final angler in for the 2015 Bassmaster Classic on South Carolina’s Lake Hartwell Feb. 20-22.

“I’d have to say my strong points are offshore, anywhere from 10 to 40 or 50 feet deep,” said the Bullock, N.C., angler who made it into the Classic by winning the individual title in the first ever Toyota Bonus Bucks Bassmaster Team Championship on Arkansas’ DeGray Lake last Saturday.

“I understand the deep fish more. I feel like I know which way they go when they leave their migration areas.”

Gray said he has been trying to learn about the fish that stay up close to the bank.

“I have spent the last two years trying to dissect that and I have got better at it. When a fish leaves the bank I don’t know where it goes, but when a fish leaves that 10-foot range I understand where it is going.”

That knowledge should come in handy on Lake Hartwell, which holds schools of deep fish well offshore. Alton Jones won the 2008 Bassmaster Classic on Hartwell by working a jig and a spoon in 25 to 35 feet of water at the edge of the submerged standing timber.

Hartwell was down drastically in 2008, more than 20 feet below normal pool, so there was little to no shoreline cover for bass to hide in. That is not expected to be the case this time around as the lake, while down some, is not nearly as low as it was in 2008. And, if anticipated heavy rains come this winter the level could rise and put more fish on the banks.

Just getting to the Classic has been a tremendous success for Gray who has seen the chance to fish the championship slip through his fingers in the past.

“It’s been a long hard road for me,” said Gray who has  come close to making the Classic three times through the Bassmaster Weekend Series National Championship.
“The last three years I have fished it, I finished second at Dardanelle and lost by 2 pounds, then lost by 2 pounds at Guntersville the year before and lost by about 3 pounds at Old Hickory last year,” Gray said.
Gray said he has been on Lake Hartwell twice before, both in the spring when the fish are bedding, so that experience won’t be much help in mid-February. Ideally, he would get five, six or seven days of practice on the lake before it goes off limits to the anglers on Jan. 1, but that is proving to be difficult, he said.

Gray, 42, is an occupational hearing conservationist, conducting OSHA standard hearing tests for companies, and his job requires regular testing.

“I tried to line up some time for practice, but nobody wants to give up their commitments, so it looks like I might only get three days at most down there before cut-off,” he said.

He will basically be in the same boat he was when he went to DeGray Lake in Arkansas. He had never been on the lake before, so he studied what he could find on the Internet, then tried working a spoon in one day of practice, then switched areas and tactics on the second day. He wound up working a Norman DD22 to catch the winning fish the last two days of the tournament, along with a 1/8-ounce Shakey Head jig tipped with a black Zoom Trick Worm.

“It’s all about making the right decisions, and I felt like I made the right decisions at DeGray Lake,” he said.

Gray said he would spend his limited practice time riding the lake and looking for potential good places to fish.

Then at tournament time, “I’d just go and do what I do.”

It worked at DeGray so it could work just as well on Hartwell.