How Trey McKinney won at St Clair, his 2nd blue trophy in 2 years

How does Trey McKinney win? He didn’t do the college fishing thing, he wasn’t a disciple of Jacob Wheeler, he wasn’t born with a fishing rod in his hand – what’s the deal?

I think you’ll see from this that like a lot of the younger cats who have risen to the top ranks of bassin’, Trey thinks differently, fishes differently, has a ton of confidence and just flat catches ’em. Here’s how he led every day at St Clair, MI and sealed the deal…on a community hole.

Going in and practice

> “I had a mediocre practice. I figured I’d finish 10th-25th – somewhere around there…. It was a good practice if I could randomly get a big bite. I felt like I would secure a good points finish. But…I realized – fine-tuning my area – that more big fish were there than I thought….

> “Map study is huge, looking at the lake and seeing how it lays out. I didn’t even realize I was fishing a public hole. In my time fishing, public holes always have the most, it’s just tricking them into biting is the hardest task.

> “Where I found them was I saw a river coming out and was like, Okay this is the coldest river around…where is this water going to go when it disperses into Anchor Bay. I kinda followed that line – I knew it was gonna be 2-3 miles of this bay.

> “It’s all flat, there’s no contours…this cold water’s gonna go somewhere out there and in 3 miles there’s gonna be somewhere that has better than average-class smallmouth. I just gotta find it.

> “In a day and half of practice I figured that out. Once I found the little area where they were, it was great but there were boats all over it. So I was like, Okay hopefully I can get enough to bite to get good points….

> “…that was definitely the nerve-wracking part of it. These fish are the smartest fish out there, and every day it’s gonna get tougher. I didn’t know it was going to be as consistent as it was.

> “The whole bay is the same depth [16-18′] so…it’s a really hard place to figure out where that upper class of fish will be. …there’s no reason because all the cover is the exact same – it’s all grass and sand.

> “What I figured out was just keeping myself in the higher-percentage areas, which was a grass, sand grass and tall grass mixture. …I knew if [big bass] would be anywhere, that was the highest percentage.

> “Fishing to me is always about fishing the highest-percentage stuff you can find, and I was just able to keep my boat…in that area that I knew was the highest-percentage area around.

> “…these fish would move [every day]…a little bit farther, a little bit left, a little bit right. I would just roam in that high-percentage area every day to find where the best place was.”

Tournament

Since he fished the same area every day, the name of the game was getting the increasingly-pressured fish to bite:

> “It’s kind of all off a gut feeling. When fishing’s that tough, every fish likes it a little different. It’s like people, not everybody wants pizza. They might want some chicken, they might want some ribs, they might want some steak. You had to figure it out….

[Some people don’t want pizza every day?? 🤯😁]

> “They were so hard to get to bite. I would chase these fish down and present every tool and idea til I found what they were the most responsive on. Then [when he figured that out] I had to find out the right cadence. And then when I got closer and closer to that cadence, they got closer and closer to biting til I finally perfected it to be able to catch that one fish.

> “Then I’d have to restart when I found the next one.

> “The cadence changed every day. That was a key I had to find. You could throw the same bait, but if the cadence wasn’t right they would run away from it. They’d see it 15′ away, turn around and not even give you a chance.

> “If you didn’t have the right cadence and didn’t bring it across right way, were gone completely. And every day I had to figure it out….”

Asked him if the cadence got slower the last 2 days because of all the pressure:

> “Actually it was getting faster. A lot of times slower is a more moderate action. If they want to eat it they’re gonna eat it. The faster it gets, the more they’re instinct takes over  – that allowed me to trick a lot of these smarter fish into biting.

> “Slower can also turn the tables as well. It’s like either go big or really small – inbetween is so moderate and they see it so much that sometimes you gotta go polar opposite: outrageously slow or outrageously fast.

> “…I had to pull out every trick in the book. You made one wrong twitch, one wrong move [with the bait] – they were gone. It was probably one of the toughest weeks of fishing I’d ever had. Just mentally draining.

> “Every move, every big fish I saw my stomach just tense up because I knew if I didn’t do every move exactly right it wasn’t gonna bite – no matter what you were throwing.”

Baits

How he picked his baits:

> “I always start with something a little bit more firm – a 5-6” [6th Sense] Shindo…a minnow  we’re coming out with [they already have it for saltwater and is sold on TW]. In practice that was the bait I found and caught them on.

> “That’s a more aggressive take and then I would go more to the slow-falling [baits]….”

> 5-6″ 6th Sense Shindo Shad (ghost pro shad, perch) on a 3/16-oz tungsten ball head with a 3/0 hook, 18-lb braid to 10-lb Seaguar Tatsu or Seaguar Gold Label fluoro (“Tatsu is the overall one I throw 24/7 no matter where, but I went to Gold Label because of the pressure – 10-lb Gold Label has a diameter of 8-lb Tatsu”), Lew’s spin reel, 7′ 1″ M St Croix Legend Tournament Spin Rod.

> Leader length: “The longer the leader, the less feel and less response you have. Normally [length] is on the edge of my reel. If I want more action and sensitivity I shorten it down to halfway up the rod.”

> Rod action: “To me that is one of the best minnow rods of the St Croix lineup. It has the right tip action to get any action I want whether it’s a soft shake or hard shake, and it throw light, heavy and everything inbetween….”

> “Your rod is a very important factor for any kind of minnow bait that you’re throwing. If it’s too soft, it doesn’t have the automatic pullback to make the minnow oscillate or roll. The main thing with the tip is you want it just light enough and just stiff enough that you can get a back and forth action. I call it recoil.

> “When I shake it, the butt of the rod hits my arm which adds another shake. So I can work half as hard and get just as much action as someone shaking it with their hand. I bounce it off my arm [so] 1 gets 2 [shakes], and 2 gets 4.”

> 6th Sense prototype dice bait (gp and gp/red), #4 and #1 Gamakatsu G-Finesse Circle Hook (“if I got ‘swerved’ [the fish didn’t commit] on the #1 I went to #4”), 1/32-oz 6th Sense Tungsten Nail Weight, 18-lb braid to 10-lb Seaguar Tatsu or Seaguar Gold Label fluoro, 7′ 1″ MF St Croix Legend X2 Spin Rod (“it’s the lightest rod we’ve ever had – usually when you get lighter you get more feel but it becomes brittle…this is durable”).

> He says 6th Sense is testing out several different dice-type baits (I think this means different shapes?) and the one in the Bassmaster pic is not close to final.

> “Definitely mayflies are a huge part of their diet…a slow-falling presentation. We have prototype dice baits at 6th Sense…trying to key in on that. They’ve been eating so many mayflies at a slow-falling rate, some fish just prefer that.

> “A slow-falling dice would replicate a bug, a creature…the same deal as a slowly-dying mayfly.”

He acknowledged using other baits/techniques as well, but did not want to detail them for sponsor reasons.

Electronics

> “I had [FFS] 120′ out on my Garmin LVS34 [trannie]. The crazy thing was is I had to catch them close to the boat because I could control my bait action a lot better closer to the boat.”

> Color palette : “I like moss and Caribbean, but to me there’s not one best color palette. [Every person has] different eyes and for me it’s not important. My suggestion is to go play with them.”

He said he hasn’t changed his FFS settings since the start of the season, and does not change any settings based on the conditions.

For mapping he used Garmin shaded relief and Lowrance mapping as well – he has Lowrance for waypoint management.

Shoutouts

> “Bass Cat, Mercury – that’s one of the most important things, getting me here and there. That boat rides good. It’s not just a fast boat, good in rough water…and calm water…handles turns in tight rivers, and handle giant waves and swells.”