March 25th kicked off the opener for the 2017 Future Pro Tour Season.

After our performance in the FPT Classic on Lake Folsom earlier in the month, we were sure ready for Lake Berryessa and a little Redemption.

Friday was the only day my son-in-law and team partner Chase Elliott and I had to pre-fish, the weather was rainy and windy all day long and basically blew us off the main lake and with the water temp getting real close to 60 degrees we had no way to check the big spawning flats that everyone had been talking about.

With the storm and colder weather we decided to concentrate on pre spawn fish in areas that would be protected from the wind. We started with a River2Sea Biggie square bill and covered a lot of water with no luck.

We found a good number of fish off the bank in the 15 to 20 foot range near long secondary points but the fish didn’t want to eat that well, we figure out a couple of baits that would catch them and made our plan for the tournament day.

Saturday morning we made the run to our first stop and started fishing, it didn’t take long before we realize that it was a little different, the fish wanted the baits moving more then the day before, Chase tied on a 3/4oz Gold Blade Runner underspin with a 4.8 Keitech Fat Impact in Bluegill Flash color and started slow rolling it in twenty feet, when I say slow I mean SLOW! about 15mins of this our first fish was a 9.67lb lagermouth that ended up being big fish of the tournament. We got 10 to 15 fish on the underspin and culled a couple of the fish with a Shakey head and a 6″ Savage Gear 3D Armor Crawler in the Watermelon Red flake color later in the day on the main body of the lake. We ended up in 4th place out of 134 teams with 19.95lbs and took home the big fish money as well.

The rods that we used for the underspin was the new EVX series from Okuma, paired with Okuma Citrex reels, these are very light and super sensitive. Fins 40G 25lb test line was our choice for this setup.

For the Savage Gear 3D Armor Crawler we choose the Okuma TCS 7 foot Shakey head rod paired with Okuma Trio-20 Reels spooled with 15lb test Fins 40G, once again super light and sensitive!

I want to say thanks to all my friends and family that continues to support me in doing what I love to do.

Also to my sponsors, without them I would not be able to fish at all!