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Meet the Author
Shaye Baker started fishing with his dad in Alabama as soon as they could find a life jacket small enough to fit him. Competing with his father in local tournaments, Shaye quickly found a hunger for competitive bass fishing. He furthered his fishing career at Auburn University helping to establish the Auburn University Bass Fishing Club. While at Auburn, Shaye served as the President of the club and qualified to fish on the traveling team amassing six Top 5 finishes including two 3rd place finishes in consecutive FLW College Fishing National Championships. While beginning to dabble in the world of outdoor journalism, Shaye continued to fish semi-pro events finishing in the Top 5 in the Bassmaster Opens, FLW Costa Series and BFLs. Finding himself at a crossroads, Shaye chose to put down the rod and pick up the pen and camera to focus on his career in outdoor journalism. Shaye has had work featured in Bassmaster Magazine, FLW Outdoors Magazine, B.A.S.S.Times and the Japanese bass fishing magazine, Basser. Shaye has also had work featured on ESPN and Wired2Fish.com,FLWfishing.com and Bassmaster.com. While working with B.A.S.S., Shaye initiated and spearheaded their GoPro division which brought more video coverage to the fans than had ever been done before in competitive fishing. After his tenure with some of the best companies in the business, Shaye identified a need for competitive fishing where participation didn’t cost a fortune. By founding UPLOADED, the Online Fishing Series, Shaye established a free tournament series where anglers could film their fish catches and upload their videos to compete against other anglers for prizes.
Shaye Baker started fishing with his dad in Alabama as soon as they could find a life jacket small enough to fit him. Competing with his father in local tournaments, Shaye quickly found a hunger for competitive bass fishing. While at Auburn, Shaye served as the President of the club and qualified to fish on the traveling team amassing six Top 5 finishes including two 3rd place finishes in consecutive FLW College Fishing National Championships. While beginning to dabble in the world of outdoor journalism, Shaye continued to fish semi-pro events finishing in the Top 5 in the Bassmaster Opens, FLW Costa Series and BFLs. Finding himself at a crossroads, Shaye chose to put down the rod and pick up the pen and camera to focus on his career in outdoor journalism. Shaye has had work featured in Bassmaster Magazine, FLW Outdoors Magazine, B.A.S.S.Times and the Japanese bass fishing magazine, Basser. Shaye has also had work featured on ESPN and Wired2Fish.com, FLWfishing.com and Bassmaster.com.
On March 28, 461 kayaks converged on the greater Shreveport/Bossier City area for the 2019 Kayak Bass Fishing National Championship. Tournament waters were confined to a 25 mile radius which included lakes Caddo, Cross, Wallace, Cypress/Back Bayou, Bistineau and a section of the Red River. While a portion of the field chose to try their luck on each fishery, the majority made their way to Caddo.
Four of the ANGLR Experts who competed in the event finished inside the top 7, including the 2019 KBF National Champion Mile Elsea, 5th place finisher Cody Milton, 6th place finisher Joshua Stewart and 7th place finisher Matt Ball.
We caught up with these 4 anglers for a recap of how their tournaments unfolded.
Jump to Section: Mike Elsea Recap | Cody Milton Recap | Josh Stewart Recap | Matt Ball Recap | Trends and Patterns
Mike ended the event with 15 fish that measured for a total of 288.75 inches and left Louisiana with a whopping $72,800! We had the pleasure of talking with Mike after the event and getting the scoop, here’s what he had to say.
This is only my second year fishing kayak tournament events. I came from the bass boat world where I used to fish the Bassmaster Opens and FLW Costa series and all that stuff. So, last year was my first year and I still have a lot to learn. I basically just fished the State Challenges last year and that’s how I qualified for this event, by finishing in the top 10% in the Indiana State Challenges. It was a blessing to qualify and have the opportunity to compete against the best of the best.
My practice for the KBF National Championship started 9 months ago.
I did a lot of research on all the bodies of water that were in play. I looked at every tournament report, YouTube video, and Google map image I could find. The general consensus was that there were more big fish per acre in Caddo Lake than in any of the others. Cross Lake put out some big weights last year in the BFL All-American, but according to all the locals it can be very hit or miss. The big fish could be turned on one day and off the next two or three. Caddo lake itself is a 25,000 acre lake and but fishes twice that size because of all the trees. So, I put all my eggs in one basket and focused on Caddo Lake pretty much exclusively. I did put in on Cross lake one evening but there were even more trees on Cross than Caddo.
These tournaments are a little different than what I was used to in the bass boat world. Here, everyone has a standardized measuring board and an identifier card or token that identifies you are in that particular tournament. So, all of that has to be in the picture along with part of your kayak. Once we catch a fish, we take a picture of it and send our picture in through an app called TourneyX. Then, there are judges on the other end that pull the pictures up and they can tell if there’s a fish that has been submitted multiple times by the scale patterns or by looking for a characteristic on the tail or something like that. Once it’s all said and done, we’re still fishing for the biggest 5 we can find, just instead of weight its the total overall length.
The Week of the Kayak Bass Fishing National Championship
I was fishing Caddo all week. Most of my fish came on either a custom hand made jig from Sink’ Er’ Swim Tackle with a Beaver style trailer on it and then the rest came on a Texas-rigged Beaver style bait. I didn’t catch many fish on anything moving, except for my first fish of the tournament which was like 20.5-inches or something like that on a spinnerbait. But after that, it was all really slow, picking apart the cover.
That first morning it was dead calm and sunny. I usually like to throw a crankbait but because of the low hanging limbs and Spanish moss, I couldn’t get a crankbait where I wanted it. You had to be right against the cypress trees to get bit. I usually prefer a chatterbait in those situations, but because it was so calm I decided that might be a little too much and went with the tandem willow leaf spinnerbait to catch that first fish.
After that it was totally different. The presentation of these baits had to very precise and I had to be as tight to the base of the tree as I possibly could most of the time. Many of the bites I got, I was actually getting hung up and then the fish would swim off with it. If I hopped the bait or worked it like a jig like you normally would, I wouldn’t get bit. If I was a foot off the tree, I wouldn’t get bit. I literally had to dead stick the bait and basically drag it right around the base of the tree until it would get hung on the bark. It had to be as tight as it could be.
With so many boats on the water I was just trying to get away from people all week. The last hour of the last day was heaven sent. I culled 4 out of my 5 fish in that last hour. It was right after a big rainstorm and the wind picked up to about 25 miles per hour. I was out in the very middle of the lake with a 2 to 3 foot chop and I felt like there probably wasn’t a boat within 10 miles of me. So it was kind of eerie.
I left them biting that day. We were supposed to have our lines out at 2:30 and I was still out there at 2:24 fishing and was afraid I had messed up and wouldn’t be able to make check-in at 5. But I made it in with plenty of time. It was truly a blessed day on the water.
Jump to Section: Mike Elsea Recap | Cody Milton Recap | Josh Stewart Recap | Matt Ball Recap | Trends and Patterns
Cody ended the event with 15 fish that measured for a total of 266.75 inches and left Louisiana with a $4,000 check! Cody had an incredible event in Louisiana and was more than happy to fill us in on how it all went down.
I also fished Caddo. I think everyone who finished in the top 100 was probably fishing Caddo.
In this one, we could launch at 6 and then we could have lines in from 6:30 to 2:30. We had to check-in by 5. I was making about a 3-and-half-mile paddle just to get to my area and I was even paddling further from there once I started fishing. I was just trying to get away from people. It would take me about and a hour and 20 minutes to get there each morning so I wasn’t even able to fish the first 50 minutes or so each day. Then it was an hour and 20-minute paddle back.
The fishing was kind of different everyday. In practice it was really trending up. The water temperature was nearing 63 degrees and they were spawning like crazy. I marked a bunch of big females up shallow and caught a 7-½-pounder and a couple 5-pounders. They were all on beds. Either on cypress trees on beds or way inside the grass lines on beds.
The first day we had sun and no wind and I caught a 21.75 fish and another 20-inch fish off the bed at the beginning of the day. I was just using a little trick worm. From there, I didn’t really have all that much. I just spent the rest of the day throwing a buzzbait up in about a foot of water. I think I ended up culling up to about 92-or-92.5-inches that day. The second day it was pretty easy to boat a short limit right out of the gates. I probably flipped a limit up in about an hour on a little trick worm.
From there, I threw an Accent River Special spinnerbait with all gold blades and a green pumpkin skirt.
It started raining and within about an hour and 10 minutes I caught about 22-pounds and I culled up from like 84-inches to 96-inches which culled every fish out. It was a pretty neat deal. I never caught a fish if I was just straight reeling it back. I was pretty much fishing it like a squarebill. If I didn’t make contact with the cypress tree and nick it off the cover, I wasn’t going to get bit. I’m convinced that some of those bass were coming off of their beds to get it.
The third day I think I was about 4-inches away from winning $73,000 dollars so I was definitely feeling it. I had a Torqeedo for the first time, so I was able to go 4-or-5-miles per hour on command and I think it was the death of me. I was kind of jetting around trying to find water. It didn’t help that 3 different tournaments launched on Caddo that day so there were a hundred and eighty tournament boats plus a few hundred kayaks on the water, but around 10:30 I finally settled in and said to myself ‘Just keep doing what you were doing to get big bites. Just nick these cypress trees with this spinnerbait.’ I think I only ended up getting to 79.25 on the last day.
If I had had more rain that last day I think I would have caught them. I only had about an hour and a half of rain and caught all my fish during that time. I just couldn’t figure out how to catch those bigger fish when it wasn’t raining. It was a really odd deal, but I’m bless it worked out the way that it did.
Jump to Section: Mike Elsea Recap | Cody Milton Recap | Josh Stewart Recap | Matt Ball Recap | Trends and Patterns
Josh ended the event with 15 fish that measured for a total of 266.25 inches and left Louisiana with a $3,000 check! Josh stated it was a tough event in Louisiana, but he was blessed to get onto some solid bites throughout his tournament days on the water.
I’ve been fishing kayak tournaments for about 4 years now. I grew up on Kentucky Lake fishing in a bass boat. I was going to school in Middle Tennessee and just wanted a way to go fishing without having to spend a ton of money, so I started fishing Kentucky Lake out of a kayak. Once I got the hang of it, I started looking for tournaments.
Now I’m doing it pretty much non-stop. It took me all the way to Sweden last year for the Hobie Fishing World Championship. I’ve been doing it non-stop for a year now. I’m grinding away, but I haven’t had a ‘regular’ job since last May.
I also fished Caddo this week. I had a motor on my kayak for the first time because Jackson wanted us to test them out. I was only fishing a quarter mile or so from Johnson’s boat ramp, so I was able to get there and set-up early on in my tournament day. I was looking for clean cypress trees. I’d fish cypress tree after cypress tree with a wacky rig and started noticing that the ones I was getting bites on were the clean ones. By clean, I mean they didn’t have grass or submerged wood around them.
I think those bedding fish didn’t want any debris or grass on their beds.
After the morning bite, it was pretty tough on the final day and I didn’t fish clean that morning. I lost my first two fish. I was fishing a huge flat with a channel running through it, but it was at most 4-feet deep. There was a tournament on Caddo on the final day and there were boats everywhere. Once all those boats started buzzing around on that flat, I felt like that really killed the bite too. You can only spook those fish so much until they won’t bite.
I was fishing for bedding fish all week. I couldn’t see them, but I could pretty much guess where they were going to be. My first day was my best day. I fished pretty clean that day but did break one off. It was my fault. I had her out in open water and backed off the drag too much and then tightened it back up and she broke me off. Overall, it was an awesome event in Louisiana.
Jump to Section: Mike Elsea Recap | Cody Milton Recap | Josh Stewart Recap | Matt Ball Recap | Trends and Patterns
Matt ended the event with 15 fish that measured for a total of 263.25 inches and left Louisiana with a $3,000 check! Matt went into Louisiana having little experience with that style of fishing, so research played a key role in his success.
I had never fished Caddo or cypress trees before, so I did a lot of research. I started focusing on the isolated cypress trees on the main lake, but I was struggling to put together a pattern with that. So, one day I headed back into a slough with thick matted grass and scattered cypress trees.
The roots around the trees there had some pretty big openings and I found out those areas were where I could get a pretty consistent bite.
Throughout the day, I keyed in on a lot of isolated patches out on the grass flats throwing a Strike King Rage Tail swimbait un-weighted waking it across the grass. When I would get to those openings, I would let it drop down and then pop it. They were hammering it when I would do that. With that pattern, I was on a super consistent bite that first day and ended up with 92-inches. The sun was out and the weather was perfect. They were very aggressive so when they bit, they’d have the whole bait in their mouth, so I didn’t lose many fish that first day.
On Day 2, I put in at a marina and used my Torqeedo and my Lowrance to navigate 2-miles back to that spot. Once I got close, I pulled up my motor and just paddled around since the grass was so thick. The sun wasn’t out on day 2 and the fish weren’t roaming those grass flats like they were on day one. It seemed like they were up tighter to those trees after that little cold front had pushed through the night before.
I caught a limit, but missed a lot of fish on that swimbait. When I would miss a fish I would mark it with the Lowrance and then return 20 or 30 minutes later with a weightless senko and just let it sit there. Most of the time, they would eat it. That’s how I ended up culling up to a better limit on day two which gave me a shot on day three.
I hadn’t had any luck on the main lake, but I knew the wind was coming and there was a lot of traffic where I was fishing.
It was a popular place that the locals knew about. But since I was fishing way back up in there, many of the bass boats couldn’t get to me because the grass was just so thick. Sadly, the bite had just shut down, I went about two-and-a-half hours that morning without a bite and I had to change it up.
Out in the middle of that area it went from about 2-feet of water to about 4-or-5-feet with bigger isolated trees and scattered grass. That morning, there were a lot of bass boats in there but the bite was off. Once the bass boats rolled through there and left, I just went through those trees and picked them apart slowly. Instead of just blowing through like the bass boats would, I would pitch a weighted black and blue senko to each side of the tree 3 or 4 times and just let the bait sit. I didn’t hop it. I would just drag it until I got to the grass and then pitch it back in there before moving to the next tree.
Any tree with a double trunk is where I would find them.
The stumps would grow in kind of a “U shaped” pattern and the bass were staging up in that. I was fishing within a hundred yards of where I had been fishing all week, but I was fishing a completely different pattern. It didn’t take long to put together a limit.
Later that day, the wind started to pick up and I was about 2-and-a-half miles from the ramp. I had to go across the lake to get back to check-in so I started getting a little concerned. Around noon, I had a good limit but not a great limit and I decided to go straight in front of the boat ramp and slowly hit isolated trees trying to cull up. I ended up upgrading two fish right there at the end so it was a good move and I was glad I did it because it got pretty rough that afternoon and that would have been a rough ride in a kayak. Overall, I left it all on the water and was happy.
Jump to Section: Mike Elsea Recap | Cody Milton Recap | Josh Stewart Recap | Matt Ball Recap | Trends and Patterns
A few trends can be derived from the experiences of these 4 anglers. Though the weather played different roles for each angler, the two main transcending factors were presentation and pressure.
The presentation had to be slow and near the cover for these 4 anglers the majority of the time, bumping the cover or dragging the bait very slowly.
Even in Matt Ball’s account of catching fish on a swimbait and Cody Milton’s account with the spinnerbait, the fish didn’t react to a steady retrieve, but instead responded to some deviation in the bait’s track. The majority of the time it seemed soft plastics drug slowly and repeatedly around cypress stumps were the prevailing means to the desired outcome of catching bigger fish.
Then boat pressure also played a key role in this event. In the Champ Elsea’s case, seeking out water without company may have been what gave him the largest advantage. We saw the same with Cody Milton. Whereas Stewart and Ball inevitably fell victim to the pressure of other anglers in their primary areas. Both were able to adjust and weather the storm as best they could and they both managed fantastic finishes in the event, but no doubt would have had a few more opportunities to upgrade provided less anglers were attempting to catch the same fish.
Congratulations to all of the ANGLR Experts who competed in the KBF National Championship and especially to the top finishers who used the ANGLR App and ANGLR Bullseye to log their catches and trips. With such a stout showing, these ANGLR Experts are proving the importance of what we’re trying to do here at ANGLR. But don’t take our word for it. We’ll leave you with a quote from Matt Ball,
“The ANGLR App is an invaluable tool to the kayak angler especially. When you’re trying to break down an area with that may targets, the ANGLR App is invaluable. Everywhere I got a bite, I could hit the Bullseye and mark a waypoint and I could sit down that night and look at my map and say, ‘Okay, what am I doing here? Where are my consistent bites coming from?’ Then you can take that and transfer it over to say Navionics and see what they’re relating to. The depth. The structure. It’s going to be great for that. Because you can’t take your Lowrance into your room at night when you’re on the road but you’ve always got your cell phone. And you can go on your cell phone and go in the ANGLR App and plan your day using data from the day before.”
View the complete results from the Kayak Bass Fishing National Championship here: https://www.kayakbassfishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/2019-KBF-NC-Final-Standings.pdf
