DT-6 in his face.
Hey everybody Mike Iaconelli here just came
off a fourth place finish at the Bassmaster Classic man it was a heck of
a week for me had fun and caught a ton of fish fishing one of my favorite ways
power fishing with crank baits. I want to tell you a little bit about the type of
area I was catching them from and the key bait for me during the week and the and
the colors it was all really a key component to catching them over three
days you know the areas were really really key and I found a few magic
places that contained flat natural rock and it was so important to find this
rock and it was it was big it was anywhere from a couple foot to four or
five foot long and it was just this real flat surface rock but it couldn't just
be anywhere you had to find that flat rock on staging spots like secondary
points main points and little high spots and when you found a combination of that
flat rock on points or high spots if it sat in four to six feet of water
you were gonna catch some fish but you know the interesting thing is you
couldn't just cast any lure out there and get bit believe me I tried you
couldn't slow reel a plastic you couldn't fish a swim bait they really
wanted to react and there's no better bait than a crankbait to make those fish
react but you had to contact the flat rock you had to bang off it you had to
touch it. It was so so important you know I started on the first and second day
with one of my standby colors for so many years this is color called
Caribbean shad in the Ike's Custom Ink colors and it's basically a faded toned
down chartreuse and blue with a little bit of orange in the throat. The reason I
use this color the first two days of the Classic is because they were feeding
heavily on shad but the water was really dirty almost muddy and that chartreuse
blue back faded out color in that dirty water looks like a shad it looks like a
shad, it's a great shad imitator when the water is dirty and and again for me
it was key you can even still see a little bit this is the actual bait that
I threw and you can see how that bill got scratched up from the rock and you
can see a little bit of red clay those high spots and the points also had red
clay and letting that bait dig and deflect. If you didn't dig and deflect
and touch the bottom you didn't get a bite so so important to make that bait
deflect but something really interesting happened on day three of the Bassmaster
Classic I got to one of my key spots that high spot in front of the bridge
with that flat rock on it and as soon as I got there I couldn't get bites I
started throwing this bait that had caught so many fish I'm not kidding you
50 or 60 fish the first two days on this Caribbean Shad and I couldn't get bites
about the same time I looked down and I noticed that the water had cleared up
about three inches, that's it. It got a hair cleaner just you could see
down about three more inches. From past experience I know that a color change in
clearing water can be real important. I put down that color I went to one of my
favorite standard shad colors favorite color of all times this is a color
called Smash and if you look at it it's very much just a putty shad body very
pale with a little bit of green in the back a little bit of gold metal flake
again with that orange throat and it was instantaneous going from no fish no
bites on a bait I've thrown for two straight days because the water cleared
I went to smash and instantly started triggering those bites ended up catching
30 plus fish on my first stop on that smash color same things
were key to cause that bait to deflect off the rock
but because the water cleared the fish really responded better to what they
were naturally feeding on which was shad. Really a great lesson for me even after
fishing all these years a great lesson of how important color is. You know
there's always a take away or a lesson from the tournaments you fish and for
me the Bassmaster Classic man my lesson my takeaway is how important
color is you know for two straight days that a Caribbean Shad that chartreuse
blue faded chartreuse blue was so key for me and going into my best area on
the last morning fishing for ten or fifteen minutes without a bite you know
honestly there were a lot of things I could have did I could have switched
baits I thought about something on the bottom I thought about you know what
they're not here today just leaving just leaving that spot but deciding because I
noticed that water clean deciding to make a color change going to a more
traditional neutral based shad color like Smash and all of a sudden just
firing them up lighting them up what a great lesson for me on how important
color is and to keep changing color until you figure out the trigger for
those fish you know and that can change not only in the course of a few days but
during the day itself I've seen it change so keep an open mind change color
let the fish tell you what color to use and that's the big takeaway for me from
this year's Bassmaster Classic