What a week!  The last 10 days have flown by so fast!  Sorry not to get this out sooner.  First off I would like to start off by saying thank you to everyone.  The part I will take away from the experience of the last 10 days that means the most is the overwhelming response of everyone who said so many kind words.  That to me is what really counts.  When fellow competitors and fans come up to you and are sincerely happy for you that really makes you feel like you are on the right track.

After the Lake of the Ozarks tournament I had some time off to go chase Elk in the Colorado mountains for a few days.  I was not a very happy guy the first few days after the event.  It really worked out well though because I had some good quality time off to reflect on my last event.  I really spent some good time figuring out where I made some physical and mental mistakes in the event.  I really learned quite a bit from that event.  When I arrived at Smith I was really motivated to finish off the year with a good finish and qualify for the 2007 FLW Tour Championship.  Lake Ouachita, the site of the '07 championship has really treated Texas anglers great in past tournaments with all the aquatic vegetation and big jig flipping opportunities, I didn't want to miss the chance to be there next summer.  So with that in mind my main goal was to make a top 20 finish and I figured that would put me in.

My strategy going into this event was just probably just like 90% of the other competitors in the event.  Target Spotted Bass.  I had only been to Smith one other time a couple years ago during a Bassmaster Tour event in the early springtime/late winter.  I learned in that event that spots are the dominant fish and there is good size largemouth in the lake but very hard to catch consistently for four solid days.

When practice began I spent the majority of my time fishing 10-25 feet deep with light spinning tackle on deep points, bluff ends, and brushpiles.  I would catch about 2 keepers a day out there and had to work hard for each bite.  It didn't take long to see on my electronics that most of the spots were suspending as soon as the sun got up around 9:00.  I could catch them pretty good on my football jig first thing in the morning but after that they would suspend in the tops of manmade brushpiles and get very hard to catch.  After two days of this torture I started to realize if I did this all day I was going to be in big trouble.  I sat down the second night and went over my maps and started to look for flatter type creeks and coves with less aggressive banks to them.  On highland reservoirs this is usually where you will find most of your largemouth concentrations.  I figured I would give the Largemouths a shot because if I could blend a pattern of early morning Spots and afternoon traditional Fall backs of creeks Largemouths then I might be able to scratch out a limit.  At least the creek fish would not be suspended like the Spots and would probably be catchable.  The only problem with that thinking is there are not as many Largemouths to catch as Spotted  bass.

Day three of practice I started off fishing for Spots again in the morning till the sun came up.  I then made my into a few creeks to check things out.  The water was very low this year so there really wasn't much in the water at all so it made it even easier.  It was bright and sunny and the water was still fairly clear in most places.  I picked up my 1/8oz.  Porky's Revenge shaky head with a Green Pumpkin Zoom finesse worm.  I just covered the back third section of every creek and picked apart any piece of cover available.  Docks, brush, wood, trash it really didn't matter.  I started getting a bunch of bites on each piece of good cover.  I ended up shaking off six good keepers in a matter of two and a half hours running creeks.  I felt pretty good about that because I knew it wouldn't take much weight to do well in the tournament.  I also did not see anyone targeting largemouth in three days of practice so that was an added bonus.

The final day of practice I spent the majority of my time back out deep chasing Spots.  The Largemouth pattern was pretty simple and obvious if you just used your topo map and covered a ton of water so there was no need to exploit it much more and burn fish.  I really don't like to practice on fish like that too much because when the lake is low there are not many targets that hold fish in a given creek and I don't want to burn them up.  I knew that the Largemouth game was the secondary pattern and the primary was Spots.  I feel like most tournaments are won on a secondary pattern and seven or eight of your top ten finishes usually are fishing the primary pattern.  So I needed to still find some Spots out deep.  By the end of the day I ended up catching a few more Spots on the shaky head on the lower end of the lake on steep banks in little pockets around brush so I gained a few more areas for the event.

The weather forecast for day 1 of the tournament was rain all day and bad storms.  I knew what I had found in practice was not going to work on the Largemouths so I was going to have to adjust on the fly the first day.  I felt like the shaky worm deal was a high sky tight to cover situation for the Largemouth and was not going to work in the rain when they weren't so tight to cover.  My plan was to start off the morning throwing my football jig and try to catch a few right off then chase Largemouth in the same flat creek areas on Day 1 but find a new way to catch them with the overcast skies.

Sean won his first tour level victory on Saturday on Lewis Smith.  He wants to thank everyone for all the positive responses and support. Details will be up soon!