“I’ve not been on the lake in a couple of weeks and the fishing is tough,” said Cobb while practicing for the championship. “I believe the high water has got the largemouth bass scattered in the flooded grass and you can’t really get to them. Then when you do it’s hard to catch them.”

On top of that, he said, the lake is the middle of fall turnover so the offshore bite “is a little weird, too.”

And, then there is the weather. Lake Hartwell is full of blueback herring and the bass follow the herring.

“A herring lake never fishes very strong when it is cloud and the weather has been cloudy with a light rain this week. That is generally not good on a herring lake and it is showing it,” said Cobb, a former member of the Clemson University Fishing Team who graduated last December.

He has been fishing two BFL Divisions and the Bassmaster Southern Opens this year, finishing 4th in both the Bulldog and Savannah River Division, and therein lies the reason he is swinging for the fences on Lake Hartwell.

He does not need to finish in the top six on Hartwell to advance to the BFL championship, the Walmart BFL All-American, because he took care of that business in the Lake Lanier Regional Oct. 10-12 with a third place finish.

“I was really happy to finish third at Lake Lanier,” Cobb said. “That takes a lot of pressure off this week. It feels like 100 pounds have been lifted off my shoulders.”

Ironically, he noted, he fully expected to do well in the Hartwell Regional and probably not as well in the Lanier Regional since he is so much more familiar with Lake Hartwell. The lake winds up past the Clemson campus so he has had the opportunity to fish it on a regular basis for the past four or five years.

“Now it looks like it will be the other way around,” he said. Unless he locates the fences on Lake Hartwell this week and lands five hefty bass each day to win the tournament Thursday-Saturday.

“I plan to fish slow and try to get five big largemouth bites each day,” he said. “If that fails I could go offshore and try to catch spotted bass on a drop-shot, but I don’t know if the tournament can be won with spotted bass, so I don’t know if I will even try that.”

The three-day tournament features the top 40 boaters and 40 co-anglers from each of the Bama, Bulldog, Piedmont and Volunteer divisions. Anglers will be competing for a Ranger Z518 with a 200-horsepower Evinrude or Mercury outboard and a Chevy 1500 Silverado in the boater division and a new Ranger Z518 with a 200-horsepower Evinrude or Mercury outboard in the co-angler division.

Anglers in both divisions will also compete to finish in the top six, which then qualifies them for the Walmart BFL All-American. Top winners in the BFL can move up to the EverStart Series or even the Walmart FLW Tour.

Walmart BFL Regional – Piedmont, Bama, Volunteer, Bulldog Divisions

Oct 17-19

Lake Hartwell

Tugaloo State Park

www.flwoutdoors.com