How Kyle Welcher crushed the Pasquotank River Elite

Kyle brought a 50cal to a regular gunfight at the NC Corral. As you know, he won by 45-07, the biggest winning weight margin in Elite Series history – at a fishery that much of the country hadn’t even heard of. Meaning it’s not a known big-bass factory like Toledo Bend, Rayburn, Guntersville, Clear Lake, etc.

Anyhow, Kyle could’ve walked away after day 3 and still won by 20-something lbs, but decided to saw on those big ol’ logs for 1 more day. The fish he found were big, but he didn’t find many. Here’s how it went down.

Going in and practice

> “Before the tournament I was extremely excited. Like I’ve had that one circled…. But when we were 10 days away from day 1 of practice, I checked the weather forecast and it was gonna be a cold front and windy. Honestly it kinda took the wind out of my sails for the tournament.

> “I knew it was going to kill the way I wanted to fish. So going into practice, I went into it with a grinding mentality.

> “I had a terrible practice – absolutely terrible. I checked a lot of stuff. I spent 2 of the 3 days of practice in the Pasquotank…because the wind was gonna blow. I knew it was going to cost me 2 hours of fishing time to get anywhere else. So I wanted to stay in the Pasquotank and I just never found anything consistent.

> “I did find 1 big one on a bed, and that’s the fish I started on on day 1. I thought that if I could catch that big one, and then catch a limit of 2-lbers and then on day 2 catch a limit of 2-lbers, I would get a check…I would survive the tournament.

> “That’s how I started the tournament – thinking that.”

Tournament

> “On day 1 I started on that big one on the bed and I caught it on 2 casts. It was a 6-lber. Then I left that area…I came back to that area and found another one on bed…a 7-lber. …that was the one that keyed me in on what I needed to do for that tournament.

> “That 2nd big one…was the key fish of the entire tournament. It was even more important than the 10-lber.

> “They were moving up to spawn on the flatter places that day. I looked all through that area on day 3 of practice and only saw that 1 fish. After I caught that 1 fish [on day 1], I looked a little more and found another, and I kept looking and found 4 more big ones. After I caught 30 lbs on that 1st day, I knew I was 100% committed to doing that.”

He fished that same area the same way every day. Here’s what he was fishing:

> “It was anywhere from 1.5-4′ deep, flatter sandy banks around isolated wood…cypress trees, stuff sticking up, laydowns, and also stumps and laydowns under the water. [He said he could visually see about half the wood cover.]

> “…mostly on stumps, but every fish was different. Some would be just on the bottom, I caught 1 out of the tip of a laydown, but most of them were spawning around stumps. I caught 2 that were spawning on the top of stumps, but most on them were on the base of stumps.

> Why they were spawning there: “I think it was a lot of soft and silty bottom around. There were some stretches of sand where they would get closer to the bottom, but…a lot of soft bottom around makes them get on that hard cover.”

Because the water was dirty, he was having to Scope his fish. The amazing thing was he’d only see 5-7 fish a day so he was getting them all to bite and landed them all. I asked him about fishing for spawners with your eyes vs electronics:

> “The only difference is confidence. Whenever you can see the fish and see your bait relative to the fish as far as proximity, it’s easy to have a lot of confidence. Whenever you can’t see your bait super well, and you don’t know which way the fish is facing exactly, you don’t know exactly where it’s sitting…it’s hard to have the confidence.

> “The biggest thing for me was getting off to good lead early. It gave me the ability to go slow and really have a lot of confidence fishing for those fish.”

Baits

> Rapala CrushCity Bronco Bug (b/b and b/b flake), 4/0 Gamakatsu G-Power Heavy Cover Worm Flip Punch Hook, pegged 1/4-oz tungsten weight, 22-lb Sunline Shooter fluoro, 8:1 reel, 7′ 6″ H Khaotic Custom Rod.

> “I caught some just deadsticking it, some shaking it, some hopping it, some dragging it. Whenever you think the fish are spawning, you make repeated casts as much as possible to irritate ’em.

> “Whenever I would see one cruising, I would just pitch to it…deadstick and then slowly start to drag it…. A lot of different retrieves – just whatever felt right in the moment based on the fish’s demeanor.

> “I was Scoping them and flipping to ’em, casting to ’em. There was so much cover there the only bait I could fish efficiently without getting hung was a TX rig.”

He also caught one on a glide bait that he didn’t weigh in.

Electronics

He did FFS his fish and:

> “…the main goal for FFS was to dodge the stumps I couldn’t see to make sure I didn’t break anything.

> “The Humminbird Coastmaster chip – I’ve never had a Coastmaster chip in my life, but that’s what [helped him] key in on the types of stretches I needed to be targeting. I could pick them out on the Coastmaster.”

> Minn Kota Ultrex QUEST: “I hit a ton of stumps this week – like a ton – and that trolling motor kept on going. And whenever I was Scoping into the wind, to have that cable drive backup really helps you stay on the target you’re trying to fish – because it’s not sloppy.”

He runs 3 Humminbird APEX 13s along with his Scope unit.