How Evan “king” Kung got ‘er done at the St Lawrence

Evan Kung just proved a bass fishing deal we all know: There’s nothing better than confidence. He knows the St Lawrence River + Lake Ontario/America real well, and even after a tough season on the Elites he thought he could win. Which he did. Here’s how it went down.

Going in and practice

> “I thought if I was gonna have a good tournament or finish in the top 10 – or even keep my career alive and finish in the top 40 – I was going to have do it out on the lake. Because that’s just where IU’m used to fishing and catching the big ones at.

> “But the first 2 practice days, when the weather was really bad, I spent my whole time in the river almost fun-fishing around. I ran into a few areas that had some big ones on it. I had like 29 lbs my 2nd practice day in the river, and realized that if we had super-windy day – like the 1st day was gonna be – I could survive 1 day in the river.

> “The last [practice] day I did go out and run around on the lake. But a lot of the stuff I fished in the tournament I didn’t even check in practice because I didn’t want people seeing what I was on…stuff I’ve fished in past Canadian tournaments.”

Tournament

> “Day 1 [on the river he fished] little humps. There’d be like a big flat and a little hump right near to where it dropped into any sort of channel where it got really deep. I fished about 10 of them day 1 [with a dropshot].

> “…1 fish here/1 fish there, especially for the big ones…usually only one big one per spot [though might be mixed in with a couple 3-4 lbers]. The 5 I weighed came from 5 completely different spots. I fished a bunch of different spots.

> “The way I did my run through the spots took me from close to takeoff almost to the mouth of the lake, to the Canadian side – a long ways away so it hard to fish [his spots more than once].

> “Day 2 I headed right out to the lake, and I sorta just got on a run of boulders I had. Some were closer together, some were father apart.

> “…flats with boulders…a couple of them were…flatter rock with little cracks in it – it almost made a little ledge. …sort of anything different on the bottom fish would get around.

> “After going through my first little section I was seeing a lot of fish roaming around. So I started trolling between all the boulders even if it was 300′ between them. I was catching a lot of fish cruising around.

> “They were a lot easier to catch than any I saw sitting on a boulder, whether they were swimming away or swimming toward me. I think maybe the ones that were roaming maybe were roaming for food.

> “[The fish] right on the boulder maybe had seen so many baits by a boulder. Whatever it was’ [the roamers] seemed a lot easier to catch. If I saw one swimming, I’d catch it almost every time.

> “…same dropshot. I had 2 rigged up. One that was a little taller I would throw near the boulders. The one a little shorter I’d throw at the ones just roaming around….

> “The 3rd day I ran out to the lake again to try to fish a lot of the stuff I fished on day 2. It was not happening. It was too sunny and calm. I only caught 2 4-lbers.

> “I checked one shallower spot I had to see if any moved up. In half an hour, I had 2 6.75s and one just over 5. I didn’t cull any fish after that. I had a a 4.3 and a 4-lber…those 2 really big ones carried the whole day.

> “I caught them with the dropshot. I threw the [GLF] spy bait around a lot [as a search bait]. A lot of weeds and stuff were along the bottom, and I drew them up with the spy bait to see where they were [then he threw the dropshot at ’em]. Unless I pulled them off the bottom, they were hard to see.

> “It was on the main lake, about 8-12′ – like a big point, but it’s so big it set up kinda like a flat. I was on the very top of it. It had a lot of grass, some open areas with sand, and little boulders mixed in…everything they wanted.

> “The last day I struggled a lot with trying to figure out if I should run to the lake or stay in the river. It was blowing pretty hard in the morning. I decided to stay in the river.

> “I went to one island and caught 22 lbs pretty quickly, then went looking for big ones in the river. I pulled into one spot I hadn’t fished the whole week and caught a 4.5, a 5.25 and a 5.75. Then I realized I had a chance to win if I could get 1-2 big ones.

> “I ran out to the lake for 2 hours and 2 bites – both were small. So I came back to the same [river] spot where I caught the other 3, and caught a 6.15..culled a 4.5.”

Baits

> Dropshot: New/not yet out Great Lakes Finesse Vibra Bug (‘crush shad’ and ‘spicy melon’), #2 BKK Drop Shot Hook, 1/2-oz dropshot weight (couple times he threw a 3/8), 10-lb Xbraid braid to 8-lb Xbraid Fluoro, Daiwa Exist Spin Reel (3000), Douglas 724 XMatrix Spin Rod.

> The Vibra Bug: “I saw the samples of it at the Classic this year, but I didn’t get the prototype ones until right before I went to the St Lawrence. I used ’em in practice a bunch just messing around in the river, just to try to get some confidence in it, and realized it worked really well.

> “I decided to throw that pretty much the whole tournament, so I was not rotating through a  bunch of lures [and] get spun out about…which one I should throw.”

> That ‘spicy melon’ color: “It’s one of my favorite colors…it looks more natural to me. A lot of these lakes we fish, [the fish] are so used to seeing gp, anything like that. So whenever I can mix it up and throw a different color, I seem to get a lot more bites.”

He dropshotted a couple urchin baits too, but he said the main deal was the Vibra Bug.

> Great Lakes Finesse Stay Pinned Spybait (‘shiner’ – that’s the [color] I found works best out there to get them to react], 8-lb Xbraid braid to 6-lb Xbraid fluoro, Daiwa Certate Reel, 7′ 10″ Douglas XMatrix Rod.

He did catch some 4-4.5 lbers on the spybait but he didn’t weigh any on it:

> “By this time of year they’ve seen so many lures, it was just more of thing to get them to react to it.”

Electronics

He was running LiveScope with the Garmin LVS34 transducer on a 16″ Echomap. He saw every fish he weighed on Scope but:

> “Most of the time I would just see them to cast at them. …hold the dropshot in place and just wait. You couldn’t really see them eat it. They’d go up to it, go away, come back – you could tell they’d been fished for.”

He was using the LVS34 because B.A.S.S. hasn’t ruled yet on the new LiveScope 2 trannies.

> “My Garmin Force trolling motor was on like 9 or 10 the whole time. I was just flying around looking for them….”

Shoutouts

> “For sure I wanna shout out Rob, the service crew guy for White River [Johnny Morris-owned boat brands]. He helped put my boat back together a couple times from banging around the waves. I had some stuff come loose.”