Boyd Duckett – Thinking About Texoma

Grinding is a term that is used in several sports. When you grind, you work and work in tough conditions to try and stay in the game. Golfers grind. Football teams grind. And anglers sure as heck grind.

When things aren’t going your way, if you don’t grind, you’ve got no chance.

This week the Elite Series is at the BASSFest tournament on Lake Texoma, and I guarantee you that every angler on the water is going to be grinding.

The trick is to not give up. I’ve got a feeling a lot of people are going to feel like giving up.

The water is way high. They’ve had record rains here. It’s muddy everywhere.

The lake is jacked up, there’s lots of debris floating around. Docks are underwater. Structures are underwater.

I understand that the lake has been closed a half a dozen times since January.

I pulled my boat up onto the shore of a park, and you wouldn’t believe the things that were just poking up out of the water. You could see the top of a structure, and a few grills. I actually made a few casts into a barbecue grill.

“Nice fish, Duckett. Where did you catch it?”

“Oh, I got it from underneath the grill.”

During the first couple of days of practice, the bottom half of the lake has been decent and fishable. The question is going to be whether, even with no more rain, they will start pulling the lake down. If they do, it could be almost un-fishable.

It’s kind of weird. I’ve run boats on lakes and rivers all over the country, and hardly anything makes me feel strange. But there have been times during practice that it almost looks like you’re running in a field.

Somebody asked me if it will almost be luck for someone to win.

I thought about that, but the answer is no. No matter how bad the conditions are, some guys will get onto something. They always do.

At the same time, it’s hard to know how that’s going to happen. I went a full day Monday and caught one small bass.

The conditions certainly have leveled the playing field. Local knowledge won’t do a lot of good.

I would have figured that Kriet or Kelly Jordon or Gary Klein, guys like that, the Texas and Oklahoma guys that know this lake, would have had a big advantage. Not so sure about that now.

They’ll be grinding just like the rest of us.