HENDERSON, N.C. (April 15, 2019) – Boater Keith Joyce of Apex, North Carolina, caught five bass Saturday weighing 19 pounds, 5 ounces, to win the 2019 FLW Bass Fishing League (BFL) Piedmont division tournament on Kerr Lake. Joyce earned $7,254 for his victory.
“I was just looking for isolated buck bushes in the back of spawning pockets as far as I could go,” said Joyce, who earned his first career win in BFL competition. “I think I caught 10 keepers total, fishing a shakey-head (rig) all day long. I did have one big fish that I weighed in that came on a buzzbait, but the rest of my keepers were on the shakey-head.”
Joyce said that he fished in the Nutbush area with a Hot Shot Lures Shakey-Head rig with a green-pumpkin KVD Fat Baby Finesse Worm and a white Hot Shot Lures buzzbait.
“It didn’t start off well – I had about 40 fish marked coming into the event, but we had bad thunderstorms and a lot of the creeks had mudslides running into them. So I just went back to the area that I had found the most fish in during practice, put the trolling motor down and just started fishing.”
.The top 10 boaters finished the tournament in:
1st: Keith Joyce, Apex, N.C., five bass, 19-5, $5,254 + $2,000 Ranger Cup
2nd: Danny Haire, Yadkinville, N.C., five bass, 17-12, $2,052
3rd: Jack Dice, Lynchburg, Va., five bass, 17-11, $1,267
4th: Chris Baldwin, Lexington, N.C., five bass, 17-9, $988
5th: Keith Roberts, Hurt, Va., five bass, 17-5, $761
6th: Todd Walters, Kernersville, N.C., five bass, 17-4, $1,202
7th: Bryan Elrod, Mechanicsville, Va., five bass, 16-15, $934
8th: Chris Dillow, Waynesboro, Va., five bass, 16-9, $571
9th: Derik Hudson, Concord, Va., five bass, 16-1, $507
10th: Shane Burns, Durham, N.C., five bass, 15-15, $444
Walters caught a 5-pound, 13-ounce bass – the heaviest of the event in the Boater Division – and earned the day’s Boater Big Bass award of $505. Tony Toombs of Drakes Branch, Virginia, won the Co-angler Division and $2,057 Saturday after catching five bass weighing 15 pounds, 12 ounces.
The top 10 co-anglers were:
1st: Tony Toombs, Drakes Branch, Va., five bass, 15-12, $2,057
2nd: Thomas Sesco, Greensboro, N.C., five bass, 15-10, $910
3rd: Bruce Pettiford, Roxboro, N.C., five bass, 14-14, $607
4th: Vincent Payne, Mechanicsville, Va., five bass, 14-7, $625
5th: Dexter Andrews, King George, Va., five bass, 13-3, $414
6th: Brian LaClair, Denton, Md., five bass, 13-1, $334
7th: Gray Hackney, Burlington, N.C., five bass, 13-0, $303
8th: Cornell Badra, Clarksburg, Md., five bass, 12-13, $273
9th: Robert Jarrett, Lexington, N.C., five bass, 12-7, $243
10th: Rich Knisely, Disputanta, Va., four bass, 12-6, $212
Toombs also caught the largest bass in the Co-angler Division, a fish weighing in at 6 pounds, 2 ounces. The catch earned him the day’s Co-angler Big Bass award of $237.