Bennett Bags Bass Fishing’s Biggest Payday - posted August 17, 2008

COLUMBIA, S.C. – As the old saying goes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

No one understands that more than Duracell pro Michael Bennett of Lincoln, Calif., who turned his junk-fishing ways into a bass-producing pattern to win $1 million dollars in the 2008 Forrest Wood Cup.

All week, the words “junk-fishing” filled the media room in the Colonial Center during post-tournament interviews as pro after pro described their fishing patterns on Lake Murray this week.

Many pros dubbed their patternless catches as “junk-fishing” or “trash-fishing,” terms that refer to going down the bank casting to “junk” such as lay-downs, willow trees, docks, grass, riprap, seawalls or anything else that gets in the way.

In the beginning, Bennett also described his fishing as junk-fishing. He spent day one fishing deep, shallow and everywhere in between to bring in a limit weighing 11 pounds, 15 ounces.

He returned to the water on day two to “junk it up” again, and that’s when he discovered the treasure among the trash. At one point during the day on Friday, he moved shallow and began casting a Snag-Proof frog along docks and grass when he hit a stretch of bank that produced three 3-pound-plus bass.

“And that’s when the light bulb went off,” Bennett explained. “Every one of those bites came from docks where the dock’s shade line intersected with the bank grass – that was the ticket. Those were the right components: where the dock met the edge of the grass in the dock’s shade.”

After finishing a limit on day two at about noon, and knowing he had made the cut, Bennett perhaps made the winning move of the tournament. He quit fishing for about an hour and just drove around the midsection of the lake, looking for the perfect combination of dock shade and grass lines for the finals. During that time, he did not fish – he simply drove around marking the likely looking spots.

“After I found several key areas to start on the next morning, I knew I had to get the deep-fishing notion out of my head,” Bennett explained. “So I spent the last couple of hours of day two fishing deeper with drop-shots and shaky heads. I had bites in practice doing that, so I wanted to make sure that pattern was dead. I never had a bite fishing that way on day two, and that’s when the shallow commitment started.”

Bennett’s weight of 15 pounds, 5 ounces on day two put him in the lead going into the final round where the weights started over. And when the new tournament started on day three with just 10 pros, Bennett started his tournament anew as well, armed with just a pair of frogs and a lot of trolling motor juice.

His primary frog was a Snag-Proof Frog in a color called “Fred,” named after BASS pro Fred Roumbanis, who won an Elite Series event on Murray in May with that very same frog.

“I probably caught 70 to 80 percent of my fish on that frog this week,” Bennett said. “And I fished it on a Fenwick Elite Tech Frogging Stick paired with a Revo 7.1 high-speed reel.”

The other frog was a buzzing type of toad, which only accounted for a few of his keepers during the week.

“I ran to those areas that I had found on day two – the ones that had the right components, but that I had not fished,” Bennett said. “And that’s where I ended up catching all my fish on day three. The neat part was that it was all new water to me – I had never fished it. But that was a key part to the pattern: It had to be new water. Fishing over water I had already fished in the previous days was pointless.”

Bennett felt that the fish he was catching from those specific areas were resident fish, not fish that would replenish any time soon.

The Duracell pro held the lead after day three with 16 pounds, 3 ounces, but by then he had worked himself into a bind.

“I fished every piece of new water I knew of on day three to catch my limit,” Bennett explained. “I had nothing else to go to on day four.”

But Bennett found a way to milk his pattern even further today.

“Earlier in the week, I had the luxury of fishing big stretches of docks and grass,” he explained. “I refused to return to those places, so I had to start fishing much smaller stretches of the right stuff – single docks or pairs of docks.”

He caught three bass on the frog pattern Sunday and, late in the afternoon, returned to a piece of riprap to catch one of his better fish on a shaky head, rigged with a Berkley hand-poured finesse worm in oxblood color, just before check-in. That fish, caught on Trilene 100% Fluorocarbon, just happened to be his second biggest fish of the day, helping him win the $1 million first-place prize. His four bass today weighed 8 pounds, 14 ounces for a two-day total of 24 pounds, 15 ounces.

After receiving his million-dollar payday, the 24-year-old Bennett was at a loss for words to explain what had just happened to him.

“I can’t even explain it,” said an exasperated Bennett. “I’m an absolute wreck – I can’t even write my own name right now (for autographs) I’m so shook up. It’s a dream come true, and the magnitude of this has not even begun to set in yet.”

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