Tournament bass fishing is anything but easy and at times can be difficult at its easiest.  In a season that has seen just a little bit of everything, the final event of the Ark-La Team Tournament Trail on the Felsenthal Waterway, sponsored by Simmons Sporting Goods, with its varying water levels, rising water temperatures and a finicky fishery, promises to stay on script.  Stay tuned folks!

Heading into the Felsenthal event, the Angler the Year race, while having a clear frontrunner, is still a long way from being decided.  Each team is trying to gain some momentum heading into the end of the year Championship scheduled on Lake Darbonne in mid-October.  It’s not often that an end of the year tournament has a lot of intrigue left in it, but the Felsenthal event promises to exceed expectations.

“Felsenthal has been fishing extremely tough lately and I expect this tournament to be no different,” said JR Grubbs, one of the members of the AOY leading team of Grubbs and Zach Johnston, “but it seems like every event this year has been a grind so the Angler of the Year race is far from being decided, we will have our hands full.”

The Felsenthal Wildlife area is based around the upper Ouachita River system.  With the water levels predicted to be at or right at pool stage, a lot of the backwater areas will no longer be accessible.  Felsenthal is a vast maze of small lakes, canals, flats and other backwater sloughs and if the water levels were up as little as a foot, fishing Felsenthal can be a dramatic change for what the anglers will face on a pool stage situation.

Considering Felsenthal is basically a shallow water fishery, expect those anglers who can find subtle nuances in these areas to do well.  One of the overlooked patterns that might come into play would be if a team can find success fishing the main river.  There’s a lot of water to be fished but the number of keeper fish to be caught in those areas are few.  Most anglers believe any weight in the low teen’s will be a potential winning stringer.

The forty-nine teams competing in the Ark-La Team Trail will launch out of Crossett Harbor at Crossett, Arkansas at safe daylight and weigh-in times will begin at 3 p.m. Saturday, June 24^th.  For more information, you can follow the Ark-La team trail on our website at www.arklateamtrail.com or on Facebook.

See you on the water!!!