Jason Duran – AnglersChannel.com

Vance McCullough

Hank Cherry had led both days 1 and 2 leading into Championship Sunday of the 50thBassmaster Classic on Lake Guntersville. He had come close to hoisting the hardware before. Seven years prior, while fishing Grand Lake in Oklahoma, Cherry lost a big bass that would have netted him the life-changing title.

Instead it was the loss that changed his life. “I don’t think it haunted me,” shared Cherry, “I think it fueled my fire. It just wasn’t my time. This time it was.”

A little past high noon on the final day of the 50th Bassmaster Classic Hank Cherry landed abig bass and closed out the win. “I’ve been waiting seven years for that bite,” he declared.

“I’m sorry, I’m mesmerized by the names on this thing,” said a distracted Cherry while staring at his Classic trophy during his press conference – the Champion’s press conference.

“Th best part about this is I don’t ever have to hear Dave Mercer bring it up again,” laughed Cherry, referring to the lost fish from years past. “That is done. It is a new day.”

In a tournament that featured more grass than a Grateful Dead concert, Cherry keyed mostly on rock, adding a few keepers the first day from an inside grass line that meandered 300 yards across a shallow flat.

To pluck the winning fish from the chilled, running waters of Lake Guntersville Cherry relied on a small assortment of lures: “4 on a jig, 4 on Jackhammers, that’s eight, 1 big one on a crankbait, the rest on a jerkbait.”

To get specific, Cherry’s jig was  his own Hank Cherry Signature Series Jig from Picasso in green pumpkin with a matching Berkley MaxScent Chunk trailer.

His Jerkbait was a Vision 110+1 in the French pearl OB color. He swapped out the factory trebles to weight the lure and says many of his fish ate the bait as it sank slowly.

But it could be said that Cherry won the Classic when he took control on Friday by throwing a Z-Man Jack Hammer ChatterBait to sack 29 pounds, 3 ounces during a blustery opening round. He believes he depleted all the fish out of the shallow area that served him well on Day 1, but the causeway replenished on a regular basis.

And the crankbait that duped a big fish when he needed it? Cherry described it as a generic LuhrJensen Speed Trap in an orange color he said was called ‘mud pig’.

Did Cherry’s practice have any bearing on his tournament success? “With the exception of the grass flat and five casts on the causeway, I never fished anything that I practiced. Just fishing the conditions. When I realized the first day that the whole field had given me the runway, that I just needed to capitalize on what was there.

“Historically, that Brown’s Creek causeway holds some of the biggest fish in the lake.”

As Brown’s Creek encompasses acres of prime spawning habitat, it’s a major draw for early springtime bass. “Everything that’s there has to go through it, they follow the rocks back to spawn. Once they’re through thy go back in the same direction,” said Cherry of the small bridge that bisects a mile of riprap, forming four distinct corners in the process. “There have been multiple 35-and-40-pound bags caught off those corners. I just did not fish the corners because, historically, like I said, that’s what everybody targets. I looked for odds and ends, places where rocks were falling off, maybe little high spots off the riprap. I’d marked them with my LiveScope. That’s how I would get the fish off them.”

In February and March, bass will stage on the riprap along the causeway while water temps climb from the 40’s into the low 60’s. Come May, you may not get a bite around thecauseway. Cherry found a very sweet spotamong the monotonous line of boulders that stretched to the near horizon. The trick with that spot is that an angler can catch a fish but then has to let the area settle for at least 10 minutes before approaching again. Maybe the bass need time to reposition on the cover, maybe the commotion makes them wary on a lake that experiences some of the greatest fishing pressure on the planet, but repeat casts will be fruitless unless an angler picks off single fish, resting the spot for a while between casts.Patience paid off for Cherry.

But then, when you’ve waited seven years, what’s a few minutes?