How Drew Gill won the Kissimmee Pro Circuit Championship

How long’s it been since Drew won? Seem like a little bit? Nah – he won the Gville Bass Pro Tour in Jan and the Harris Chain Pro Circuit in Feb = $325K in winnings for those 2 wins plus last weekend. Not too dang bad!

That’s 2 more wins than he had in 2025 and 1 more than he had when he showed up on the natty scene: 2024.

Drew obviously has distinguished himself as one of the best “new guys” on the tours, and ain’t shy about sharing what he knows and learns, which is great. Here’s how he mowed ’em down this time. He won it by 10 lbs with 75-03 with a dirty 30 on the final day: 31-13…which is a palindrome. 😁

Going in and practice

> “…obviously it’s no points. And when you’re going to tournament with no points involved…there’s no reason to go for anything other than winning.

> “…after 3 days of practice, I really did not feel like I was on anything that was great. I was around some fish but…in the very best-case scenario, I could patchwork it together to catch about 60 lbs….”

He said he practiced 2 days on Toho and 1 on Kissimmee, and chose Toho:

> “…I spent all day [on Kissimmee] and I caught 3 fish. They were good ones, but I only caught 3. It would be dumb to just go down there on a whim. I had…a way to catch a pretty solid bag our of the peppergrass on Toho.

> “I had 3 stretches…I wanted to fish…3 stretches and a brushpile. I thought [the pile] was gonna be incredible…when I found it, there were about a dozen on it, all over 5. I thought I was going to play a big role for me [but] they were never on it in the tournament.”

Tournament

Day 1

> “I was was boat #1. …I started on that random brushpile. …there was one 4-lber on it…and I couldn’t get the 4-lber to bite. So it was kind of a rough 1st hour of the Scope period for me.

> “…I went from that pile to just kind of piddling around in that general area…because I’d seen a couple big ones floating around in practice. Never saw any. So I ended up running down to the community stretch…which at the time, there was no community there. It was just Levi Thibodeau [5th] and Ryan Lachniet [6th]….

> “…it was the next-closest stretch to that pile that I fished. I…poke around [and catch] almost 21 lbs out of that stretch.

> “When I caught my last 4, I had fish that were all over 3. That 2nd [next-closest] stretch was…in my mind a little bit because I really didn’t spend any time there in practice. I got a couple bites, but it wasn’t great. But I felt like there was something there.

> “I caught a 2 and 3.25 there to end the 1st day [everything came on a dropshot].

> “The areas that were key on Toho…you had to have peppergrass, clean bottom, and you had to have a lot of life around – it had to be 6-8′. Shallower than that, you didn’t have enough clean bottom. And deeper than that, you didn’t have a lot of life.

> “So that 6-8 zone, you had some clean bottom, but you also had a lot of light. And that was just kind of the magic zone that week.

> “That peppergrass was the deal. The hydrilla…overall it wasn’t that great. That offshore peppergrass in the midsection of Toho was the juice.”

He said the community hole – his 1st spot – was more like a community zone:

> “It was about…1/4 of a mile wide by close to a mile long…it was a pretty big swath. …8 people were actively fishing that zone at one time in the tournament, out of 40 boats. That’s 20% of the field.”

Day 2

> “…I started in that community [zone]…but it was really crowded. The voices in my head were already starting to talk and…I really wanted to go spend more time in that 2nd area. I felt like there’s something there.

> “But in the first 5 minutes I caught a 6-11 on a dropshot. I caught a 3 and I caught another little one, then I went on a little dry spell for about 40 minutes. I’m not liking how this is going. I only need to catch 2 more, and I know it’s about an hour left in my Scope period, but I know I can catch at least 2 more in that other area.

> “I went to the other zone and immediately caught a couple 2.5-lbers…and then I caught a 3 and then I caught a 7. And I said, ‘Hold up, wait a minute.’ You don’t catch an offshore giant in FL for no reason. Generally, if you find one, you found at least a dozen of them. You just gotta figure out why that fish was there.

> “…I got a little bit deeper in that area, like 8′. I saw a great big giant one, pitched my dropshot…swam right over to it but didn’t bite it. I threw an urchin at it multiple times – it did not bite it. I finally got it to bite on a big minnow.

> “I went alternating between the big minnow and urchin for the next 40 minutes…and that one was all I had for the rest of the period. I didn’t get any more committals…I had another 2 that were over 6 get up on my bait and not eat it.

> “I was like, okay…this area’s got some legs. …I need to figure out how to make ’em bite because I won’t see enough of them to justify throwing at 3 to only catch 1.

> “…I started to work my way out into the middle of the lake from the zone that I was in because I was like…maybe I just need to get a little bit deeper on them. When I got deeper, the bottom got really clean…a little pocket of clean bottom that was about 200-300 yards wide.

> “I saw a couple big ones…there’s gonna be more big ones if I come back tomorrow.

> “The issue I had was I hadn’t spent enough time there to figure out where the zone ended. I really like being able to put myself in a box, where I can give myself a real heavy focal point. [And in a FL tournament] where you’ve got dirty water [and] big fish, a lot of times you can retread your water a lot more often than you can other places.

> “So I was like, I’m gonna side scan. …I scanned over this area where those fish were…a big swath of clean bottom [with] columns of peppergrass that are fairly contained.

> “I found one stretch, just outside of where I fished, and…pretty much had my zone. I knew where it started and where it stopped, and where it just kind of became endless grass.

> “…but after throwing at 3 big ones on day 2 and only catching 1 of them, I knew that my issue was not just going to be where do I fish. It’s going to be, how do I fish for them? So I spent 3 hours doing tackle after day 2.”

Day 3

He was 5 lbs behind the lead going into day 3:

> “I’m just trying to strategize…if I need to treat this like bed-fishing and…lock in on a big one and approach it multiple times, I’m willing to do it.

> “[And] they switched up on that worm. Day 1 my worm bite percentage was literally 100%…and then for about the 1st hour of the Scope period on day 2…I knew something had changed.

> “…I knew I was going to have to make some pretty aggressive adjustments because that community hole had been getting ransacked. …it felt a little sketchy to me on day 2…it just didn’t feel right.

> “Day 3 I kind of tried to keep [his plans] low key because I didn’t want to cause a shift or a change in everybody’s game plan. So I was trying to go out as if it was business as usual, but…I was going to give it about an hour [of] no Scope [at the community zone] to stagger my time….

> “I threw a ChatterBait for about an hour [and caught a dink]. I just wanted to be present, to not draw any suspicion that maybe something else was going on…like maybe this area is dried up.

> “You know that line in ‘Avengers Endgame’ where Thanos says he used the stones to destroy the stones? The community hole and all the people that were [fishing it and doing well]…eventually completely collapsed.

> “I went to my other area, where they had not been biting an urchin…. I had up my 300 rods on the deck and I was prepared to throw all of them at every big one that I saw. I’ll be danged if I didn’t pick up the urchin [first for the first one he saw] and it actually acted right: I snapped it once and caught it – it was a 3.5 .

> “And I proceeded to get every single big one I saw [to bite that urchin] for the next 3 hours. I didn’t land all of them – I lost like a 5.75 that would have given me like 33.

> “…it was absolutely pandemonium. I ended up catching 11 over 4, I think…it was just an absolute nuke fest for 3 hours [including a 7-09 and 7-11 back to back].”

Baits

> Urchin (large size, mostly scuppernong but also gp), 2 1/0 Owner Cover Shot HD Hooks, 3/32nd weight, 40-lb Seaguar TactX Braid to 24-lb Seaguar JDM Grand Max Fluoro Leader, Bass Pro Shops Johnny Morris Carbonlite Tech Reel (8.3), 7′ 1″ H F Phenix Recon Elite Rod.

> “… throw it out there and snap it every once in a while.”

> The rig: “…hook in the front, the back hook with a split ring on it, hooked through the split ring. That’s that’s the way that I’ve been rigging it since the [2025] Toyota Championship…2 single hooks in line….

> “…it works really well when you’re using it on Scope. It’s not as great of a blind-rigging method because you’ve got to hit them pretty hard with those Cover Shot HD hooks. And when you’re blind-fishing, sometimes you don’t know you got a bite. One swims at you and you just never get it tight and you lose them.

> “And…with those heavy straight shanks, when you drill them, they don’t come off very often. I lost one fish out of the 20 or 22 that I got to bite in that period.

> “I’m starting to like braid to leader for an urchin because you can get that bait to respond really well with shorter rod movements [and] sensitivity when they bite it is a little bit better.”

He caught all his fish the first 2 days with the dropshot except that 1 minnow fish:

> Dropshot: 7″ Big Bite Baits Nekorama Worm (matte margarita), 1/0 Roboworm Rebarb Medium Wire Hook, 3/8-oz weight, 22-lb braid to 15-lb Seaguar JDM Grand Max Fluoro Leader, Johnny Morris CarbonLite Spin Reel (200), 7′ 6″ ML Phenix K2 Spin Rod.

> Why that color: “In FL I’m always a big proponent of purples and reds – colors that stand out in off-colored water. [That color] has good visibility in dark water.

> “They were biting [the dropshot] so good on day 1 and early on day 2, I’d literally pitch out in front of [fish], give it a little shake and they’d shoot right over and drill it.

> “It was very odd they switched up on it so hard. When they go to really biting something and [then] not bite…something has changed and you have to change with it. You can’t just keep bashing your head against the wall and hoping that maybe they’ll start biting it again….”

Electronics

For Scope he runs a stock Garmin 1643 and the LVS34 transducer:

> “Nothing too fancy. I run it tighter [in FL] and I fish fast. The best way to win FL tournaments – this is like duh, a no-brainer – is to catch giant ones…generate 2-4 bites over 5 lbs a day. There’s a lot of competing trash fish there in that 2-4 lb category…..”