What lessons can you learn from some of North Carolina’s most-promising young bass fisherman? Here they are.
Whoever said, “Today’s young people just don’t get it,” hasn’t spent any time with some of North Carolina’s best young bass anglers. Some of them are already making inroads in tournaments and scholastic fishing, and they get it.
Ethan Cox, Clint Benbow and Josh Hooks of N.C. State’s Basspack fishing team, along with 16-year-old Tyler Purcell of Pittsboro, have made plenty of noise at a relatively early age for bass fishermen.
They spend most of their spare time either fishing, preparing for fishing, or talking about fishing. They are all average students — it’s difficult to be an honors student with all that fishing related stuff to do — and most have their own bass boats. These young anglers are the future of the sport, and most are headed toward careers in areas related to the outdoor industry.
Older fishermen could profit from the things these four have learned. Here is your opportunity.
Purcell, a high-school senior, served notice that he is an angler to be reckoned with when he won a 2-day American Bass Anglers tournament on Kerr Lake (Buggs Island) last year. Not only did he beat some excellent fishermen, he did it while fishing from the back of the boat as a non-boater. The ABA draw format handicaps the non-boater, as they are not only fishing against other non-boaters, but also the boater they’re paired with, plus all the other boaters. As a result the odds are stacked against non-boaters, and the odds of winning a 2-day event are almost nonexistent. But Purcell won, and by a sizeable margin, catching his fish flipping plastics in shallow water while most everyone else was fishing deep.
In 2008, he and team partner Dennie Gilbert won the Buggs Island team trail’s points championship, winning three of that year’s tournament. In his first BFL event in 2010 on Kerr, he won the co-angler big-fish with a 4.75-pound bass and finished seventh overall in the 2-day event. In the 2011 Bassmaster Weekend Series trail, he has two second-place finishes as a co-angler, and he’s got a third-place co-angler finish in a BFL on High Rock Lake. He plans to move into the boater category next year in some tournaments, while continuing to fish from the back of the boat in others.
Purcell’s favorite lake is Lake Mayo, and his favorite technique is deep cranking.
“I love that thud when they load up on a DD22,” said Purcell, who also loves to fish Texas-rigged plastics and to flip jigs.
A handful of things Purcell likes to do include:
• Use a Front Runner ahead of his topwater lures, fishing them on heavier line to help keep the lure working on the surface.
• When deep cranking. he spools up with 10-pound fluorocarbon line to help get his baits deeper, and he uses an 8-foot cranking rod with micro guides and a high-quality, super-tuned reel to get the best casting distance possible.
Clint Benbow of Statesville is a junior at N.C. State majoring in environmental science with a goal to work as a watershed hydrologist — which deals with anything to do with water-flow control like flood prevention. He passed up a wrestling scholarship to a smaller college to attend N.C. State, mainly because he wanted to fish on the Basspack team.
As a freshman, Benbow was the top Basspack angler in terms of points, and this past season, he finished second in points race on the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament trail. In addition, he has done fairly well on local tournament trails around Lake Norman and Lake Wylie.
Last January, he and Cox, his roommate, carried a third fishermen to Norman, his home lake, on a 28-degree, bluebird day. Using Shaky head worms and white/pearl Zoom Flukes rigged on Scrounger heads, they caught nice spotted bass and largemouths all day, better than 20 in total.
Two tips that Benbow shares are:
• He uses a speed clip to attach a Scrounger head to his line, saying it’s the best way for your lure to achieve the correct action.
“I always fish a Scrounger head behind a snap swivel; otherwise the line kills the action,” he said.
• He looks for spotted bass on the edge lines where chunk rock transitions to smaller rock or smooth bottoms.
“There are fish on most any bank on Lake Norman,” he said, “but you always find the best ones wherever the bank changes from rock to dirt.”
Cox is a senior from West End majoring in business administration who was tops in points on the Basspack the past two seasons. He finished sixth as a co-angler in the March 2011 Bass Southern Open on Lake Norman, and he and Benbow won the 2010 Wake Forest Invitational on Lake Gaston.
He wants to work in management for an outdoors retailer and eventually fish the Bassmaster Elite Series. His favorite lake is Shearon Harris, where he and his father, Darryl Cox, welcomed another visitor last November on a cold, bluebird day.
Fishing jerkbaits, jigs and small crankbaits along the edges of wind-blown grassbeds, Cox caught a pair of 7-1/2-pound bass, and his father topped him with an 8-pounder.
More recently, he boated a 5-fish, 25-pound limit on Harris fishing deep-diving crankbaits, the big stringer anchored by an 8-pound fish.
Deep-cranking is his favorite technique at Harris. He fishes a Specialty Tackle Junior D crankbait in the 10-foot range and a Spro Little John Deep Diver in deeper water.
“My favorite technique is postspawn summertime cranking with baits that run around 14 feet,” he said.
Being a crankbait fisherman, Cox has a few things he does to make sure he makes the best of his opportunities:
• He spools his cranking reels with 10-pound fluorocarbon, usually the Seaguar red label line.
Hooks, the third Basspack teammate, is a senior majoring in fisheries and wildlife management who wants a job in the fishing industry. He and partner Casey Johnson won the 2011 FLW College Series event on Lake Erie, a win worth $10,000 for N.C. State. He’s recorded multiple top-10 finishes in college events, including a seventh-place finish in the 2011 Mercury College Bass Fishing National Championship. He and another partner, Jaime Fajardo, have three top-5 finishes in Fishers of Men N.C. Central Division tournaments this year.
Hooks’ favorite technique is fishing a Senko along grass edges at Shearon Harris, his favorite lake. He loves pitching weighted Senkos into deep grassbeds in six to eight feet of water, and he estimates that he power fishes up to 150 days a year.
Hooks loves deep-diving crankbaits, and his favorite topwater bait is an Iovino Splash popping bait, which has worked for him in tournaments from North Carolina to Texas. A well-rounded fisherman, he has several tips for fishing drop-shot rigs:
• First, use 8-pound red-label Seaguar fluorocarbon with no braided-line backing for drop-shot rigs. He feels that braided line that many fishermen use makes the drop-shot rig float up off the bottom.
• He recommends using a small barrel swivel on a drop-shot rig about eight feet up the line from the weight. It won’t spook the fish, and it will keep line-twist problems to a minimum.
These four young fellows already know how to fish, having mastered the technical aspects of the sport. Often using their cell phone cameras to send out Facebook photos of fish while on the water, they use a combination of new technology and old-school ethics and hard work, which all add up to winning results at many levels of the sport.
College fishing boasts 300 teams
More than 300 colleges across the country have bass-fishing teams that compete on the FLW College Fishing circuit. The country is divided into five divisions: Central, Northern, Southeast, Texas and Western.
Five teams from North Carolina regularly compete: N.C. State, UNC Wilmington, East Carolina, Charlotte and Wake Forest.
N.C. State’s “Basspack” has the best overall record among North Carolina entries. The team was formed as a club in 2005 and has more than 50 members. Currently ranked No. 3 in the nation, the Basspack won national championships in 2006 and 2009 and regional championships in 2009 and 2010.
The college fishing season runs from September through April, with six qualifying tournaments and community service events: the Wake County Senior Games, Jordan Lake clean-up day, the annual Warriors on the Water tournament) and club-meeting attendance all helping a team member accumulate points.
N.C. State’s Basspack has qualifying tournaments scheduled for Falls of Neuse Lake, Jordan Lake, Lake Gaston, Hyco Lake and Shearon Harris Lake, followed by a 2-day championship on two undisclosed lakes in April.
The top eight team members in points at the end of the club season participate in four FLW College qualifying tournaments between March and August. The top five teams from each FLW qualifier advance to college regionals in September and October. The top five teams from each regional fish in the national college championship., and the winner of the national champion fishes in the FLW Cup, where the first prize is $600,000.
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