COLUMN: Jake's takes: Chasing pros across hundreds of miles of river
I’ve been on the water a couple of times for Bassmaster events, but the Elite Series on the Arkansas River wasn’t anything like I expected. The last two years, I was on the water at Grand and Tenkiller, but river fishing is nothing like fishing those lakes. There are about 500 miles of water from lock 15 to lock 17 that anglers could have covered.
Sermersheim_mug Sermersheim With little creek offshoots and little branches leaving the main water, anglers were scattered across the giant body of water through the four days of the event. Usually, when covering Bassmaster, I have a tail on Cherokee County’s Jason Christie, but this tournament, he decided to go to some remote shallow places for the first three days. That made covering him challenging, but opened the door to covering the rest of the field.
Day one, we tailed Muskogee’s Blake Capps as he picked apart what could be called his home fishery. The second-year pro had a solid day and we saw him catch a handful of his five-fish limit, but his day was cut short when half the field was eliminated. Day two was a wild one, with the river changing form, which I missed to make the paper deadline, thankfully.
Big waves caused by the wind and current pushing in opposite directions made the waters a dangerous place. Several pros got hit by massive walls of water when traveling at 70 mph across open water. I was back on the water for day three without a real plan, just hoping to find Christie and any other pro we spotted on the water.
After about two minutes of traveling, we ran into Carl Jocumsen — Australian pro and former Bixby resident — who was having some engine problems. To me, it looked like Jocumsen was looking for fish, but I was quickly proved wrong when he flagged down the media boat I was in. Once we realized his propeller was blown out, we tied him up and towed him back to the dock so he could get a new boat.