Toyota Guntersville Media Event Day 1

Advanced Angler.com’s Dan O’Sullivan is at Lake Guntersville in Alabama for a media event with Toyota Trucks pro staffers Terry Scroggins, Mike Iaconelli and Gerald Swindle.  The event is being held at Dream Ranch; an amazing lodge near the shores of one of the most famous bass lakes in the country.

The focus of the event is to work with the pros to gather educational material that will fill the pages of Advanced Angler for months to come.

On the first working day of the conference, O’Sullivan spent the first session with Scroggins and the second session in the afternoon with Iaconelli.

The conditions at Guntersville are cold and cloudy with a little drizzle periodically throughout the day.  The water temperature at the lake is running between 53 to 57 degrees, and there has been breezes blowing up to 13 miles per hour.  The water color varies from slightly stained to dirty as a result of the recent storms that have blown through the area.

Below is Dan’s report of Day One

Morning Session with Big Show
We started early this morning with Big Show taking us to a causeway that had current flowing out of it.  Scroggins decided to throw a Bomber Fat Free Shad crankbait looking Guntersville’s prespawn bass to be stacked up behind the culvert.
We interchanged the Fat Free Shad with Xcalibur XRK25 and 75 lipless crankbaits that we hopped off the bottom near milfoil.  We managed to catch nine or 10 bass to four and a half pounds throughout the morning, and the highlight of the day was landing a 20-pound drum that struck Scroggins Xcalibur.

After the morning session, we returned to the lodge for lunch and meeting up with our new partners for the afternoon session.

Afternoon with Ike
We went to another area of the lake and started fishing rip rap jetties with Rapala DT crankbaits and Berkley Gripper Jigs, and by the time we’d hit four stretches of rocky banks, a shaky head worm  was added to the mix as well.

When we ran down lake to the dam, we found an isolated pocket off of the main lake that the depths registered 6.2 to 6.9 feet deep on Ike’s Lowrance HDS units, Ike pulled out a DT Thug in red craw color, and I matched him with a DT 6 in the same color.

Two hours later with several small keepers, two drum that weighed more than 20 pounds, a gizzard shad and a five pound largemouth we decided to return to the lodge to get ready for dinner.

In both sessions, the bass bit around submerged milfoil after the bait broke free from the grass.

I start the morning tomorrow with Gerald Swindle, and will report back tomorrow evening as well.

Video of  Ike explaining the use of Lowrance HDS to Find Pre-Spawn Bass”