I am sitting here in the RV during a major thunderstorm in Gadsden, AL. I’m fishing the second PAA Series tournament on Lake Neely Henry. Today, day 2, was canceled because of the weather, which was a good call in my opinion, but I wish I had a couple more days to catch up. I’m sitting in 114^th place after day 1, and the full field will be fishing tomorrow, which is good. Hopefully I can make a huge jump in the standings. I’m not really sure what happened yesterday, I was doing really well in practice. They are messing with the water level due to all the recent rains and it’s making the fish act weird. I probably caught 40 keepers yesterday, it was a culling nightmare, and I only weighed 7.38 pounds…crazy. The last day of practice I caught a 7 pounder, a 5 pounder, and a couple 3′s, and the little ones were still everywhere. Most of the fish I’ve been catching are on a Rapala Fat 3 crankbait in super shallow muddy water and around rocks. I’m very disappointed in yesterday, but the chances of making a big come back are certainly there for me.

I’m coming off of a 5^th place finish at the last FLW Series event on Lake Eufaula, what an awesome lake that is. Guido really whacked on ‘em, eh? I had a lot of fun in that derby, more than normal. I caught so many big fish over the four days that my hands were bleeding, for real. I basically found all the places I fished during the actual tournament because were I’d been practicing got trashed by the 10 inches of rain we got in practice. It was cool because almost all the fish I brought to the scales came from three exact casts! I had three different spots and the cast had to be so specific, it was unbelievable. I made the same casts thousands of times I bet during the tournament. My whole deal revolved around the shad spawn and most of my fish came on a white 1/4oz Stanley spinnerbait, with the exception of day two, when I caught everything I weighed in on a 5/16 oz  black and blue Tabu open water series jig with a black Yamamoto 4″ twin tail grub trailer. I also finally surpassed the $1 BLK_PAA dollar mark in career earnings and we will be announcing the winner of the Autographed Jersey Contest very soon. Thanks to everyone for playing. My audio recap from Lake Eufaula will be live on the website soon, hopefully later today.

The next event is an FLW Tour on Lake Norman, NC. We have 4 days off after this PAA tournament, so that will be nice to get a little breather. We plan to spend Easter here in Gadsden and then head out on Monday morning sometime. We are staying at Noccalula Falls Park, which is one of the nicest camp grounds we’ve ever been, so if you ever plan on visiting the area, be sure to check this place out. I’m looking forward to Lake Norman, I hope it turns out to be a site-fishing deal, but we won’t know until we get there. My co-angler practice partner, Alton Lackie, AKA, the “Lack Attack” is not fishing the Series this year, only the Tour, so we will be hooking up for practice at Norman. Get ready Lackster, I feel a pair of top tens in our near future. We had a tremendous practice last year at Norman and then it all fell apart, I don’t remember why, but I’m sure it had something to do with a swimbait.

Well, I’m going to pick on the local boy here at Neely Henry, Matt Herren. He’s camping here too and is about the only one lower than me in the standings so far, ha, ha, ha. I’m sure he’ll probably spank them tomorrow, but for now I’m ahead of him and I’m going to go let him know it, just in case he hasn’t seen the standing sheet. Take care everybody and I’ll talk to you again soon!

Dave