Lake Murray, SC is Anthony's home lake, and if his math is right this weekend's $100K put him close to $1 mil in earnings on that one lake! 🤯 Did he have it wired this time? Should all major tournaments at Murray have an asterisk with "Gagliardi Family Fund event" in fine print? 😁 Gonna answer the first one anyhow, here goes:
Going in and practice
> "Going in I knew that the fishing was gonna be good. I knew they would be spawning, and I was fairly certain there would be some post-spawn fish. I honestly didn't feel like I was going to have a huge advantage there that time of year because the fish were shallow and were going to be on the bed.
> "I don't have a whole lot of experience with post-spawn stuff [there]. The 2nd I got there on the Pro Circuit [April 2021] was really the first time I'd been there [in the post-spawn] to speak of...so I didn't have a stockpile of places to go check....
> "I wasn't real thrilled about the prospect of a full-blown herring bite because I don't know it as well as I should.
> "I just wanted to have a good event...don't bomb here on your home lake....
> "[In practice] I caught them okay – I found a couple places the herring were on...but I didn't catch any good ones doing that and didn't have a real good feeling about the herring stuff. I didn't catch the size I knew you'd need.
> "I saw good many on the bed, and the first day of practice I kind of stumbled on the dropshot deal. From the beginning that's the one that intrigued me the most because I caught some good ones on that in practice. I didn't know for sure what do in the event."
Tournament
> "I would start on herring, catch a few on the dropshot, then go sight-fishing, struggle, and come back to the dropshot and save the day. That's pretty much how the first 2 days went. It didn't take long to realize that was the best thing I had going.
> "I was fishing points...anywhere from 6' to 14'. Some of the points had grass on 'em a little bit, some of the points were rocky, some of them were clay – it really did not seem to make a difference.
> "All had stripers around – every one of them would have stripers breaking around. The stripers were not breaking up on the bank. There would be stripers breaking up on the shallow part of a point, the typical spot, but where I was fishing there'd be more singles and small groups of them...a lot of feeding activity around me.
> "...just fished around, I'd see an individual bass by himself or I caught a good many of them throwing to a group of fish I knew were stripers. They'd all follow it down to the bottom but they wouldn't get it. If one would be on it, it would be a largemouth. I didn't catch a striper on the dropshot.
> "...stripers and [largemouth] being close to them I think might have turned the bite on a little bit. ...those bass have always have traveled with those stripers – they're open-water fish.
> "The herring spawn...some of the better places aren't even points, they're just spots. It has to be hard bottom, usually some type of rock or clay or a combination of the two, but that's pretty much it. None of my 5-fish limits had any herring fish in them.
> "The sight-fish stuff was just pockets, small pockets – short pockets...."
Baits
> Dropshot: 6" or 7" finesse worm (morning dawn), 4/0 hook, 1/4-oz tungsten weight, 10-lb Gamma braid to 12-lb Gamma fluoro, 3000-series reel, 7' M Level Rod ("a little stiffer rod than I normally fish a dropshot with because of the size of fish I was fishing for").
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