I wrapped up the second stop of our 2026 season in 42nd place. If you’ve been keeping up with my columns, you’ll know that this certainly doesn’t meet expectations. However, I wasn’t upset about how the week unfolded for me. I spent a lot of my practice trying to make the offshore game work. With pretty much the entire field committing to the bank throughout practice and the event, I felt confident that if I could find something off the bank, I would have a chance to win the event. Today, I’ll break down my approach, when I decided to punt, and why I’m content with the decisions that I made.

Throughout the first two days of practice, my approach was overwhelmingly dedicated to finding a group of offshore fish. This doesn’t necessarily mean deep! I used my Humminbird 360 to fish offshore stumps on flats hoping to intercept a group of post-spawners. I’ve been successful doing this at similar fisheries, but I felt like there were too many stumps on Millwood to concentrate the fish. I then turned my attention to hard spots in 4 to 6 feet of water. I found some of the best-looking places that I’ve ever seen not to have fish on them. I checked current breaks in the river, and ditches through pad fields as well. The vegetation on Millwood seemed to clean the water up, and from what I can gather, there’s just not a significant population that lives off the bank. I still maintain that there is a “magic deal” off the bank, but I couldn’t find it in two days.

Going into the final day of practice, I knew I had to find a way to survive the event. I believe in fishing to win, but some events don’t line up for you, and you have to figure out a way to get paid and save points. I finally stumbled into an area upriver that had some flipping fish biting at 3:00 on the last day of practice. Since it was the first meaningful bites that I had gotten, I shook off every bite that I got. I had no idea of the size of those fish, but I did know that there was a two-mile stretch of river that had a solid population of fish biting and very minimal traffic. I felt confident that I could get a few bites during the tournament but didn’t have time to learn the intricacies of the area. Consequently, I caught fish using a different technique each day of the event. In these shallow-water events, leaving an area that has a population of fish is not smart unless you have an area that you’re confident fish are using.

Missing a check by three places stings, and I certainly wish I could have made a run at the top 10, but my tournament decisions were solid. Pulling the plug in the tournament to run to a new area on Day 3 could have resulted in a better finish, but with so much dead water on the fishery, I opted to stay put and maximize what I had found. If I would have fished shallow more in practice, I likely could have found the additional areas that would have generated the extra bite I needed to get paid, but I still believe that I practiced to win!

I’m excited for the next event on Lay Lake. It’s one of the most historic fisheries on the tournament circuit and will be here before we know it!