DT-16’s Help Defoe Win Bassmaster Open on Home Lake
OutdoorHub 06.03.14
An open mind helped Ott DeFoe close out a win last weekend in a Bassmaster Open on Tennessee’s Douglas Lake. The Rapala pro caught fish both deep and shallow, mostly in up-lake spots far from the mid- and lower-lake community holes that other competitors hammered on his home lake. “Any kind of victory’s great, but having won at home is a really special deal,” DeFoe says. “That’s the kind of thing you dream about.”
He caught most of his fish deep on the first two days of the three-day tournament, but found a shallow bite on the final day to get the win. He caught his deep fish on a Rapala DT-16 crankbait and a Terminator Football Jig. His shallow fish came mostly on an Arashi Silent Square 3 crankbait.
“It might have seemed like a risky move, but mostly I was just trying to get a bite,” DeFoe says of his strategy to keep moving farther up-lake and ultimately fish shallow after taking the lead fishing deeper.
Having determined in practice that the usual mid-lake deep bite “was a little bit off,” DeFoe decided to start his tournament up-lake, rather than in and around Douglas’ deep, mid- and lower-lake community holes. He figured he could run back to those spots later in the day after boxing five decent keepers away from the crowds.
To his surprise, however, he caught a few four-plus-pound fish in up-lake spots that rarely yield more than three-and-a-half pounders. Some of those spots produced again on the second day too, so he pushed further up the lake and continued getting quality bites.
“They were pretty similar places,” Defoe said of the spots on which he caught several big bass on a Caribbean Shad pattern Rapala DT-16 and a 1/2 oz. Green Pumpkin Terminator Football Jig with a green-pumpkin crawfish-shape soft-plastic trailer. “On most of them, the fish were in 13 to 15 feet and I was sitting in 17 to 18 feet.”
After catching the most active fish on those spots with the DT-16, he threw the Terminator Football Jig as a “clean-up” bait to “the same exact places,” he says. Knowing the lake as well as he does, he targeted “really small drops” not likely to be obvious to anglers with limited experience on Douglas.
“Some of them had rocks, but some of them were just basically slick mud,” he explains. “It’s just small, really subtle stuff that doesn’t really show up on any mapping or anything. There’s not much cover, to speak of. There’s just something there with the way the water moves or something, and they’re places where fish get. So knowing the lake really well and knowing where those places were was really important.”
How To Fish A DT-16
Anglers fishing on their home lakes can experience similar success this summer with DT-16’s, DeFoe says. Target water in the 13- to 15-foot range where there’s a significant depth change nearby.
“One thing you especially want to consider is where those fish spawned and what their migration routes are out to deeper water, where they’ll spend a lot of the summer,” DeFoe explains. “A migration route could be a ditch or a creek channel — those type of places. The fish may not be actually in them, but they’ll probably be close to them. Look for intersections where fish funnel in and funnel out.”
To keep a DT-16 in the strike zone for as long as possible, DeFoe makes long casts on no heavier than 10-pound line. “DT” in the bait’s name stands for “dives to” — a DT-16 will run 16 feet or deeper on the recommended line. If you’re not grinding bottom through at least half of your cast, DeFoe says, you’re probably not casting it far enough, or you’re throwing it on too heavy a line.
Shallow Bass
DeFoe’s shallow bass came on a 1/2 oz. Terminator Pro Series Jig in a prototype color, and Arashi Silent Square 3’s in the Black Silver Shad and Hot Blue Shad patterns. He flipped shallow trees and stumps with the Pro Jig. He burned the Arashi cranks as fast as he could around rocks in about two feet of water.
“The fish were coming up chasing really big threadfin and gizzard shad that every once in awhile would get washed across the rocks there,” DeFoe recalls. “They were really shallow. There was a little bit of current coming across this place and I was burning the Arashi back to the boat.”
In a tournament many predicted would be won deep, that shallow spot yielded most of the five fish that accounted for DeFoe’s 24-pound, 1-ounce Day 3 haul — the tournament’s heaviest limit.
“Those usually good deep spots down-lake just weren’t producing like they should, and I was getting better quality than usual on those upper-lake spots,” he explains further. “It certainly was a risk to do what I did, and it paid off more than I expected.”
