Welcome to the BassBlaster, your daily email about all things bassin’. Take a sec to forward this Blaster to a bassin’ bud, willya?

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Today’s Top 3

Testing out this 3-day a week schedule for the hunting season. Let me know how you like it, good or bad.

1. Clay-sand break key for BWS win.

This weekend, Albert Collins, a local, won the Bassmaster Weekend Series Championship on TX’s Rayburn. No secret it would be won offshore, but:

> “The key thing to every spot I fished was there was a combination of clay and sand on them. You’d be dragging your bait across the bottom and feel the clay and when it hit the sand and vice versa. That’s where they were at – where it transferred from clay to sand.”

He won it with these baits: E2 Bait Co. 10” BigTail Worm (red bug) and Zoom Ol’ Monster (plum apple) worms; and Norman DD22 (TN shad) and 6th Sense Crush 300DD (chartreuse threadfin) cranks.

If you’ve never heard of a 6SC 300DD like me, here’s what one looks like in the color Albert used. Hope to have more about these baits soon.

2. Krieger’s side-imaging key to win.

Outdoorsfirst has a cool story about EverStart champ Koby Kreiger’s use of side-imaging to help him win on the Ouachita River. Some tidbits:

> “The key wasn’t finding the visible timber but the ‘invisible’ wood around it. You might have a few trees sticking out of the water, but the fish were holding to submerged trees around the visible wood – stuff you just couldn’t see without Side Imaging.”

> “I could see money fish on specific submerged trees and just knew I’d catch on that particular waypoint. I probably scanned 50 to 60 trees on that 3-mile stretch and 25 held fish, and of those 25 well over half you couldn’t see without Side Imaging.”

> “60% of my fish came off the invisible trees. Finding them was a huge deal. If you’re fishing a 3-mile stretch of river and there are only 10 visible trees, it’s going to get hit pretty hard. But you find another 20 trees that the other guys can’t see and you’ve got a game up on them.”

Example image:

3. You can sit down with Rick Clunn and see if you can beat him at poker.

– About a BassZone fishin’/poker thang in Okie-ville this weekend. Having been the subject of a Clunn penetrating stare on more than one occasion, I’m thinking he will kick your tail in poker.

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News

1. AZ’s Pleasant has Largemouth Bass Virus.

2. CA’s Oroville has new min size limit.

> Adoption of a 12-inch minimum size limit, with the five-fish daily bag limit remaining the same.

> Fish biologist Kyle Murphy asserts that the lake is overpopulated with spotted bass inside the slot limit, and that the change will thin out this overpopulation, freeing up more of the food sources, and allow the bass population to grow to a larger average size.

3. Win a chance to go to the Classic.

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Tip of the Day

Walk a drowned dog?

Is this just crazy enough to work? Long article, worth a full read.

> Slow-sinking walk-the-dog lures are a largely untapped genre, so when fish explode on your topwaters and don’t connect, it may be time to take your walk-the-dog cadence slightly under the surface.

> “Up North, I like the Rapala SubWalk in June, July and August,” said two-time Classic qualifier Terry Baksay. “A lot of times in the postspawn they’re interested but don’t want to eat something like a popper. They’ll blow up and miss it, but he thinks he hurt it. The SubWalk is the ultimate comeback bait. It’s so subtle, he thinks it’s in the death throes so he’ll come back and get it. It’s perfect in places with a lot of grass like the Potomac. It sinks so slowly you can almost walk it in place.”

> Inclement weather is best. “When it’s a bit windy, it makes it better. But cloudy days are better than anything.”

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Quote of the Day

I’m going to spend two weeks, possibly three, prefishing after Thanksgiving.

– BWS winner, and thus Classic qualifier, Albert Collins about prefishing Grand Lake. He also said this about making the mother of all bass derbies:

“I woke up this morning and told my wife, ‘I still don’t believe it.’ It’s what I’ve been wanting to do since I was a little kid. It’s hard to grasp the fact that I’ve got the chance to do that. I’m thrilled.”

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Shot of the Day

Great shot from Wired2Fish. You wishin’ that was you too?

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