BEAVER LAKE -- Near the end of a day of a thousand casts, Dylan Hays of Sheridan finally noticed a glimmer of consistency.
Hays, in his first year competing on the FLW Tour, spent Tuesday practicing for the tournament on Beaver Lake. This part of the state isn't in his orbit, so the sprawling White River reservoir is foreign to him.
"What's the name of this creek," I asked as Hays made a sharp right turn into a small tributary.
"I have no idea," Hays said, "but I like the way it's walled in. It's got some laydown wood and some good structure."
That's really all that matters to a professional angler, places where bass might live. They exist as waypoints on a massive Lowrance HDS-17 electronic display. Traditional names and landmarks don't mean a thing.
It's a tiny creek that tumbles out of a ravine behind Horseshoe Bend Marina. Hays pitched a pumpkinseed colored Zoom Brush Hawg to every piece of wood in the cove, and after about 30 minutes, he got some positive feedback.
"Look at that," Hays said as his line sliced through the water. "That's a good one."
Hays did not set the hook. Instead, he "weighed" the fish by the resistance on the line and the intensity of its pull. You don't hook fish in practice if you can help it.
"He felt like he might have been 3 or 4 pounds, but I couldn't really tell," Hays said. "Big ones eat a lure and kind of swim around with it. Little ones run fast, like that one did."
Hays is part of a thoroughbred Arkansas fishing family. His wife, Melinda nee Mize, is the daughter of Jimmy Mize and Lucy Mize of Ben Lomond. Jimmy is a former Bassmaster Elite Series angler and former Bassmaster Classic qualifier. In fact, he led the first round of the 2005 Classic in Pittsburgh.
Lucy, a pioneer of women's bass fishing, was a charter member of the defunct Bass'n Gals circuit and defunct Women's Bassmaster Tour.
"Lucy was the first woman to ever weigh a bass on the Bassmaster Classic stage," I said.
"Negative," Dylan retorted. "Lucy never fished in the Classic."
"No, but the 2008 WBT championship at Lake Keowee was held in concert with the Classic at Greenville, S.C., and the women weighed in before the Classic weigh-in. Lucy was first across the stage."
A big, proud smile spread across Hays's face.
"I'll be danged," he said. "You learn something new every day."
Anglers talk about all kinds of things in a boat, but mostly they talk about finding bass. That was tough last week because Beaver Lake had risen fast after a spell of hard rain. The water in the White River upstream from the confluence of Prairie Creek was the color of chocolate milk, and it was full of logs and other debris.
"Where we're fishing right now was dry ground a few days ago," Hays said as we fished another pocket off the main river.
That was a constant theme, and that meant that thousands of acres of new water would be in play for the tournament. That took all existing patterns off the books.
"Matt Arey said he's had the worst practice of any tournament he's ever fished," Hays said.
That's meaningful because Arey, of Shelby, N.C., won this tournament in 2014-2015.
Entering another pocket, Hays handed me a rod containing a spinnerbait with a small silver willowleaf blade and a small orange Colorado blade.
"Throw that and see if anything happens."
I threw the spinnerbait behind everything that Hays fished. With water rising into the pockets, fish should be on the back side of cover to take advantage of a simulated incoming tide. I caught two keeper Kentucky bass quickly.
A co-angler could cash a check with two limits of Kentuckies, but a pro needs heavier fish.
We went all the way upriver to Blue Springs, south of the Arkansas 12 bridge. The water looked terrible, but Hays had a hunch.
"A lot of times after a big rain, you can get past this big slug of dirty water and it'll get clear again," Hays said. "I've seen that on Greers Ferry, and this lake is very similar to that. If you can get behind this stuff, you can wear them out."
Hays canceled that idea in short order. A big storm was brewing, which meant a new push of stained water would come downriver.
Clear water was available around Blue Spring, but fish wouldn't bite.
"My best day of fishing this lake was right in this area, about 1991," I said.
"Is that right?" Hays asked.
"Yep. I fished with a local guy named Scott Little. That's when soft plastic jerkbaits were new, and we came up here and smoked them with a bait called the Fin-S. It was unreal. We'd be pulling out backlashes, and 3- and 4-pounders just swarmed those baits."
"Be nice if we could get into something like that now," Hays said.
Working back downstream toward Prairie Creek, Hays fished non-descript little pockets off the main river.
"A lot of this stuff gets overlooked," Hays said. "There aren't many fish here, but it's got access to shallow water for the bigger fish in the river. If you can run these things and get four or five 2- and 3-pounders, and then get a 5- or 6-pound kicker fish somewhere, that'll get you to 15, 16 pounds. Do that, and you're right there."
A bite near the end of the day confirmed the hunch. As he approached a mat of floating trash, Hays said, "This is the kind of place where 'Kong' lives.
He flipped his Brush Hawg into an opening about the size of a tea saucer. His line went taught.
"Dang, I'm hung," Hays said.
He pulled up on his rod, and something pulled back.
"That's a nice one," Hayes said.
"How nice?" I asked.
"Five pounds, six? I don't know. A nice one. The kind you need."
With a fish like that, Hays said he could go downlake and catch four keeper smallmouths.
"That would put me right there," he said.
Sports on 04/30/2017