Kentucky Lake Smorgasbord For Stage 5

If you asked most of the Bass Pro Tour field how Kentucky Lake was fishing after practice concluded, you’d have heard a lot of poor reports and bellyaching. While this might not be the “Kentucky Lake of old”, day one proved this fishery is still full of bass and is perfectly capable of producing the infamous Tennessee river beatdowns like we used to see a decade ago. 

Kentucky Lake was a frequent destination for me and teammates back in our college fishing days, and there used to be a country buffet near Paris, Tennessee – in between the Kenlake and Paris bridges – that we would stop in to. Regardless of how we did on the water, Kentucky Lake was always synonymous with that old-school, homey buffet for us. 

After embarking in a lengthy Google search, it seems that restaurant must have gone out of business, but thankfully Kentucky Lake is still serving up a smorgasbord for Lowrance Stage 5 of the Bass Pro Tour presented by Mercury. There were scoreable bass of both the largemouth and smallmouth variety caught on literally dozens of different lures and multiple techniques during day one of competition.

Many of the anglers at the top of the leaderboard employed traditional ledge fishing tactics likes deep diving crankbaits, Carolina rigs, football jigs, hair jigs, or magnum spoons. While other top performers took full advantage of their single forward-facing sonar period, using FFS and a jighead minnow to pick off suspended bass. 

Local favorites like Jake Lawrence showcased the “new” Kentucky Lake, firing up schools of offshore bass with traditional ledge tactics while mixing in single swimbaits and a drop shot to target Tennessee River smallmouth to add to his weight. Smallmouth used to seemingly disappear from this lake in the summertime, but their population is established to a point that anglers can target them these days. 

To add to the buffet menu, overcast conditions and rain greeted BPT pros to start the event today.  This helped lead to plenty of shallow bass being caught on topwaters, chatterbaits, squarebills, and flipping baits. It’s been truly impressive and refreshing to see so many patterns at play on a fishery you could have been led to believe was only home to carp and non-scoreable bass if you listened to the dock talk.

BPT anglers are spread out from the Kentucky Lake dam down to the Kenlake bridge (southern boundary for Stage 5), with boats venturing to Lake Barkley to catch their fish, too. Mark Daniels Jr. is one such pro choosing to spend his time shallow, on lesser-known Barkley, where the Team Toyota pro caught over 30-lbs of bass en route to a mid-pack finish after day one.

“I came into practice for this event dead set on finding those big Tennessee river schools to target,” MDJ explained. “But I just never found enough. The best thing I had going was a flipping bite over an hour away on Lake Barkley. That’s what I decided to do today and, honestly, I had a dang good day based on my expectations.” 

Daniels Jr. boated over 25 bass today, with thirteen scoreables that has him below the cut line going into tomorrow. MDJ, like many BPT competitors, is going back to the drawing board tonight to make his gameplan for day two of the Qualifying Round. 

“I’ve got some thinking to do tonight man,” MDJ offered. “There are ten different ways I feel like I could go catch some tomorrow, but I have to catch enough to jump up ten places, and these boys on those offshore schools are smashing right now. I want to go power fishing shallow again, but my gut says I’d be lucky to replicate my weight today. I only have one school I found on the Kentucky side, but I might have to gamble with it.”

Tournament fishing is always a game of decision making at the highest level, but with so many viable patterns on Kentucky Lake – these decisions are magnified. The good news, you can catch ‘em in a myriad of ways right now. The bad news is the competition can, too. 

Mother Nature is serving a smorgasbord for Stage 5 right now and there is a long list of lures and techniques on the menu. 

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