COLUMN: Jake's takes: Chasing pros across hundreds of miles of river

I’ve been on the water a couple of times for Bassmaster events, but the Elite Series on the Arkansas River wasn’t anything like I expected.

The last two years, I was on the water at Grand and Tenkiller, but river fishing is nothing like fishing those lakes. There are about 500 miles of water from lock 15 to lock 17 that anglers could have covered.

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Sermersheim

With little creek offshoots and little branches leaving the main water, anglers were scattered across the giant body of water through the four days of the event. Usually, when covering Bassmaster, I have a tail on Cherokee County’s Jason Christie, but this tournament, he decided to go to some remote shallow places for the first three days. That made covering him challenging, but opened the door to covering the rest of the field.

Day one, we tailed Muskogee’s Blake Capps as he picked apart what could be called his home fishery. The second-year pro had a solid day and we saw him catch a handful of his five-fish limit, but his day was cut short when half the field was eliminated.

Day two was a wild one, with the river changing form, which I missed to make the paper deadline, thankfully. Big waves caused by the wind and current pushing in opposite directions made the waters a dangerous place. Several pros got hit by massive walls of water when traveling at 70 mph across open water.

I was back on the water for day three without a real plan, just hoping to find Christie and any other pro we spotted on the water. After about two minutes of traveling, we ran into Carl Jocumsen — Australian pro and former Bixby resident — who was having some engine problems. To me, it looked like Jocumsen was looking for fish, but I was quickly proved wrong when he flagged down the media boat I was in. Once we realized his propeller was blown out, we tied him up and towed him back to the dock so he could get a new boat.

Even though he had to tell the media boat driver to speed up a couple of times, we got him there safely, and he had a chance to get back on the water later that day. After that, we tried to find the location, but once we checked his location, there was little to no chance of us finding him in remote, shallow and stump-filled creeks miles up the river. With Christie impossible to reach, we ran around the river looking for anybody and everybody.

Well, finding people on the river isn’t as easy as finding those Tenkiller or Grand. After about 30 minutes of running around, we finally ran into Andrew Loberg, followed him for a while and saw him catch a few fish in the meantime.

With our window closing, we decided to go up to a spot where we knew many anglers were hanging out. Where the Illinois River flows into the Arkansas river proved to be a hotbed every day prior to anglers having to leave pool 15.

We ran into Mark Menedez, who was picking apart a huge bank of land going up and down and up again, catching a few flipping some sort of bottom bait. Soon, more and more anglers started to pull up on us. First, Trey McKinney arrived and caught a bass on a point; then Christie pulled up about 100 yards away from me and gave me my first chance to get some pictures of him on the water.

Then finally, we found the cherry on top in eventual champion Jacob Foutz. The Tennessee angler was hard to locate that weekend, and we were the first to get pictures of him in skinny creeks, hunting bass for Championship Sunday.

The final day Sunday was spent chasing Christie for the first time that tournament. The nine-time champion didn’t go to places that were impossible to reach, but he still didn’t make it easy. After the event, Christie apologized to the group that followed him Sunday. The Cherokee County pro was zipping around the river with the authority that someone could only have if he’d spent hundreds of hours on the lake.

At one point, my media boat driver looked at me and said, “I would never do what he’s doing if we weren’t following him.” He took us through a knocked -down pillar that we later found out claimed someone’s engine a few weeks ago.

Even through interesting routes and shallow waters, I was just relieved we finally had a chance to tail Christie and his top five finish.

The past three seasons, the Bassmaster has had a major event in Oklahoma, and with packed crowds in Muskogee, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re returning next year.