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With one minute to spare before lines out, Michael “Ike” Iaconelli landed an 18.50-inch bass that lifted him to victory Saturday in the Bassmaster B.A.S.S. Nation Kayak Series...
Iaconelli’s winning fish engulfed his Berkley MaxScent Creature Hawg with just enough time for him to haul it into the boat, measure it and photograph it before the official lines out time of 2 p.m. ET.
“It’s funny how those things happen like that,” he said. “I was flipping and flipping and watching the time click. At 1:59 p.m., I pitched in a mat and it sank about a foot and the hydrilla shook. I saw my line jump and set the hook, cranked it in on 65-pound braid, swung it in, unhooked it and submitted the picture all within a minute. It was an incredible thing.
“It ranks up there as one of the most exciting fish catches I’ve ever had in my life.”
Throughout his years of tournament fishing, Iaconelli has accumulated hours of experience on the Upper Chesapeake Bay, a place he calls a “premier fishery” in the Northeast. This time of the year, however, is one of the more difficult seasons to generate bites.
“It is a special place, but it has this ugly stage which is early August through late September,” he said. “Today was one of those days. It was hard to get bites. Sometimes the grind tournaments, when you do well or win, mean even more than the easy ones.”
Iaconelli fished parts of a big grass flat, specifically targeting ditches that drained out of the flat as well as hard hydrilla edges that were pinned against deeper creeks that ran through the flat.
With all of his experience on the Upper Chesapeake, it was the first time he fished these specific areas of the flat.
“The quality that lives out there is what attracted me to that flat. It has a tremendous amount of 15- to 20-inch largemouth. The challenge was finding them. One of the reasons it gets so tough in August is that flat turns into a grassbed. It is mainly hydrilla, star grass, eelgrass and it is 5 square miles of it.”
Iaconelli landed five bass around the drains and ditches on a Texas-rigged black/blue flake Berkley PowerBait The General with a 1/16-ounce VMC nail weight on an Abu Garcia spinning rod. His two biggest bites came punching the hydrilla edge with a black/blue flake Berkley MaxScent Creature Hawg paired with a 1-ounce tungsten weight and a 4/0 VMC Flippin’ Hook.
He said the tide played a major role.
“The golden rule of tidal fishing is low water is always the best,” he said. “I had an early window of low water. This morning I caught four within the first hour and a half. When we started it was low but coming in.
“As the tide started to come in, the bite really shut off. I went a long time without a bite. I caught the 19.50 on the bad tide, a dead high tide, and that got me my limit.”
Read it all: https://www.westernbass.com/article/iac ... ats-buzzer
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