It's a trip back to Amistad for Legend Boats pro angler Pam Martin Wells! During the press conference after being crowned the First WBT Champion, Wells said that her husband Steven promised her that if she won the championship that he would take her back to Amistad for some FUN fishing.
With a very impressive 15 pound 8 ounce limit today, Pam knocked second place finisher Sheri Glasgow's 31-5 out of the hot seat. With a three day total of 38-7 Pam Martin Wells becomes the first woman to be crowned champion of the Woman's Bassmaster Tour.
Pam said that she was in the final few minutes of the event when a grass bed, that she hadn't fished through out this event, was calling her name. She said it was almost like divine inspiration, she looked up and it was as if there was a ray of sun shining on a small patch of grass in the back of a pocket off the main lake. She motored to it and told her observer, "I am going to catch a good fish here!", and she did, her biggest bass of the day at 4 pounds 8 ounces.
With the refreshed confidence she'd found yet another patch of grass that looked perfect, on her final pitch to that grass she said a good fish boiled on her bait as she pulled it out of the grass, but missed it. Knowing it was a good fish she made 4 more identical pitches to that exact spot and on that fourth pitch her second biggest bass of the day struck. After boating a 4 pound 5 ounce bass, she quickly culled the smaller one in her live well and headed in. Even at this point she was not completely confident that she had won the tournament.
During the pre-fish for this tournament, Pam had found some really good largemouth and knowing if she could continue to get them to bite she would be able to dominate this event. While this didn't play out as well as she would have like, end the final count down of the last day it all came together for her. When asked what adjustments she made from her pre-fish and through the changing weather patterns, Pam said "I didn't, I knew where fish were and stuck to to my original game plan and did not waver. I was very confident in the water I was fishing." She did mention that her electronics played a big part in keeping her on fish, with a pass or two and her graph she could tell exactly which side of the points that the spotted bass she was using to fill her limit each day were staging. "These spotted bass tend to move quite a bit and my Lowrance electronics allowed me to keep my bait on the fish", said Wells.
Pam basically had two patterns. Pam said, "In my 21 years of professional bass fishing the one thing I have learned is a limit goes along way", so to fill her limit quickly, she used a Carolina rig to dissect points from 4 to 45 feet of water catching a variety of spotted bass on two different Wave Worm baits. After she got her limit, she went hawg hunting pitching jigs and plastics to small patches of grass that were growing in the backs of smaller pockets off the main channels.
During her pre-fish these small patches of grass were very productive in putting largemouth in the boat. However, the water temperature had dropped from mid to upper fifties in last month's pre-fish to 47 degree water that would warm to 49. Wells stated, "47 degree water is hard on shallow largemouths and they basically shut down, thankfully this warming trend in the weather allowed the water to warm enough each afternoon to start the largemouth bite."
