Pick Your Poison In Alabama Bass Trail South Division Tournament On Lay Lake
The Alabama Bass Trail South Division tournament on Lay Lake Saturday is going to be one of those “pick your poison” tournaments, said veteran angler Rex Chambers of Cullman, Ala.
“Half the field will be going for largemouths and half the field will be going for spots,” said Chambers.
A lot will depend on current in the lake this Saturday, he said.
“If we get some rain between now and then there should be plenty of current for a good bag of spots. If there is not a good current, everybody will have to concentrate on largemouths.”
Chambers said the majority of the spotted bass will be caught upriver, the last five miles or so of the river where the heaviest currents are.
“The spots are totally current dependent. If they run current all day they will bite all day. But more than likely it will be like it has been this past month. They will probably run current until about 9 or 9:30 a.m. and then shut it off. Once the current stops that will be the end of the spotted bass bite.”
Top tactics for the spotted bass, he said, are swim baits, Shakey heads and spinnerbaits.
“You can throw a topwater, but it’s not worth the time fighting all the stripers. You could spend half a day with 3- to 6-pound stripers on your line if you are throwing topwater.”
The largemouth fishing will be mostly concentrated from mid-river to the lower dam and it will probably be an 85 percent grass bite, Chambers said.
“It will be mostly swim jigs, spinnerbaits and regular jigs for a flipping bite. The flipping bite is pretty good right now and a lot of people are targeting shallow structure,” Chambers said.
“The largemouths are not current-dependent and that always helps. If you can find a good largemouth bite your best bet would probably be to go for big largemouths all day long, but I’m just too stubborn to do that.”
Chambers and teammate Brent Crow are currently ranked 10th in the South Division of the Alabama Bass Trail. He and teammate Kevin McMahan are ranked 67th in the North Division.
Chambers made national news May 3, 2014, when he and his fishing partner at the time, Danny Pettus, were both seriously injured in a boating accident. A detective with the Cullman Police Department, Chambers and Pettus were fishing in the Homeland Security tournament on Wheeler Lake when their boat hit a submerged log. The impact knocked their outboard motor off the transom and it landed in the boat on top of Chambers, causing serious and permanent injury. Marine Police rushed to the scene and got Chambers and Pettus to the hospital.
“It was a wild couple of seconds, pretty scary,” Chambers said. “I will never be healed up completely. I am as good as I am ever going to be.”
But once he recuperated he was right back in the boat and back to fishing tournaments – and the Alabama Bass Trail is tops, he said.
“I think it is one of the best ideas in fishing a long time. All the other states around us are starting to copy it and it has some of the best fishermen in the state,” he said. “I fish both divisions and there is no comparison to the caliber of fishermen on the trail.”
Alabama Bass Trail – South Division
Sat, Jun 20, 2015
Lay Lake
Paradise Point Marina & RV Resort
Call Kay Donaldson 855-934-7425
