Jeff Reynolds Wins Lake Texoma Southwestern FLW Series

Jeff Reynolds couldn't really buy into what he was seeing when he started practicing for last week's Lake Texoma Southwestern FLW Series. The Calera, Okla. resident lives just five miles from one of the boat ramps on the lake and has fished hundreds of tournaments there during all seasons of the year, and he couldn't recall ever finding so many big fish in deep water with the calendar still under a September heading. "I was seeing a lot of fish out there (on his electronics), but I couldn't make myself believe they were there," said the former Bassmaster Elite Series competitor. "It almost got me in trouble - living here and having so much experience on the lake, I know that the deep bite is never strong this time of year. "I spent several days not even trying to catch those fish. I was just writing them off as stripers." The action close to the bank wasn't as good as he'd anticipated, however, so he eventually determined that he had to find out whether the fish he was seeing on his graph were actually black bass (largemouths or smallmouths) and not line-sided descendants of East Coast imports. They definitely weren't the latter. Between those deep-dwellers and others that were in the skinnier water they were supposed to be inhabiting, Reynolds had enough fish to carry him to victory. He amassed a 51-09 total over three days and collected a prize package valued at approximately $80,000. The loot comes at an opportune time, as he's in the process of building a house and awaiting the arrival of his first child - a daughter who'd due not long after his 44th birthday next month.

Competition:

Reynolds competed on the Elite Series for the first four seasons of its existence (2006-09) and on the Bassmaster Tour for several years prior to that. He made four Bassmaster Classics and logged six top-10 finishes in tour-level events. Nowadays, he has steady work with Careco Multimedia, operating a camera for fishing and hunting shows, and fishes a lot of tournaments at Texoma and other venues in the region. He has no desire to return to the tour lifestyle. "I'm pretty happy where I'm at right now," he said. "The only way I'd ever consider (going back) is if I had somebody show up and offer me a lot of money for sponsorship. "I probably fish more now than I did when I was on the Elites. I get into 20 or 25 tournaments a year, at least." Will the arrival of his daughter cause him to scale back on tournaments? "It could a little bit - it's hard to say because I've never had a kid before. My wife is 100-percent supportive of me fishing and she knows how much I enjoy it. I'm going to keep fishing tournaments, that's for sure."

Reynolds doesn't have an explanation for the situation he discovered at Texoma over the past couple weeks. "I've thought about it a lot and I really don't understand it," he said. "The only thing I can come up with is there's so many shad in the lake right now - I've never seen this many - and the (bass) are scattered from the main lake to the backs of the creeks. You can find shad anywhere you want to go." He used a Texas-rigged worm to pull most of his deeper fish from the 18- to 21-foot depth range, but caught one that was within a few ounces of 6 pounds from 27 feet. He threw a Heddon Super Spook at the ones that were still near the banks. "The shallow ones were very shallow and that was a big timing deal. They weren't staying up there all the time; a lot of the time they'd be sitting off the breaks and I couldn't catch them there. When they started pushing the shad up on the flats and feeding on them, you could catch them pretty good if you were there at the right time. "I threw the spook a couple different ways. On the second day it was pretty cloudy and I was working it a little slower, making it walk real wide. When the sun was out and the wind was blowing, I'd work it faster. I'd start with a medium-speed retrieve and then make it get real erratic, mimicking what shad do when a bass gets after them. Sometimes they wouldn't feed until I made it do something crazy."

Winning Pattern:

Reynolds said the most critical elements of his program were not baits, but rather his HydroWave unit and his Garmin Panoptix sonar. "I'd have the HydroWave on full-blast on the "bait blitz" setting when I pulled into a place and I wouldn't ease in there," he said. "I wanted to get the bait moving around and the bass fired up. I'd pull up and put my trolling motor in the water and shad would start flicking, and usually right after that something would come up and show itself. "One of the best areas I had was where a little ditch came into a flat and I could pull in and use the Panoptix to see where both the baitfish and the bass were at. I'd turn the trolling motor around and scan and if I saw the bass up in 5, 6 or 7 feet, I knew it was fixing to go down (with the Spook). If they were out in 17 or 18 feet, I'd start throwing that worm."

Winning Gear:

Topwater gear: 7'9" heavy-fast Cabela's XML Umbrella Rig rod, Cabela's Arachnid casting reel (8:1 ratio), unnamed 65-pound braided line, Heddon Super Spook (blue shore shad).

Worm gear: 7'3" medium-heavy Cabela's XML casting rod, same reel, unnamed 20-pound fluorocarbon line, 1/2-ounce bullet weight, 3/0 EWG worm hook, Zoom Trick Worm (green-pumpkin).

Main factor: "Moving a lot, which is the way I fish this lake. Very seldom do you pull up and catch all your fish from one spot - you need a lot of spots and you need to be doing at least a couple different things, especially for a three-day tournament. I was burning nearly a full tank of gas every day."

Performance edge: "I got the Panoptix hooked up just before the tournament. It's the most unreal thing I've ever seen in my life."

FLW Costa Tour Lake Texoma Winning Pattern BassFan 9/27/17 (John Johnson)