ANDERSONVILLE, Tenn. (March 11, 2024) – Boater Jimmy Neece, Jr., of Bristol, Tennessee, caught a five-bass limit weighing 17 pounds, 2 ounces, Saturday to win the MLF Phoenix Bass Fishing League (BFL) tournament on Norris Lake. Neece earned $4,720 for his victory. Early spring in East Tennessee is Damiki rig season. It’s the perfect time to finesse big prespawn smallmouth bass with a small minnow-shaped soft plastic in deep, clear water. And that’s exactly how Neece caught his winning limit of smallmouths.
“The fish that I was catching are prespawn and suspended out at the mouths of pockets and spawning areas,” said Neece, who owns a construction company.
“I really looked for the shad and looked for the stripers,” he added. “There’s a ton of stripers in that lake. And if I found the stripers, the smallmouth were somewhere close by. You’d into some areas and there wouldn’t be anything – no trash fish and nothing swimming around. If you got into an area with a lot of stripers congregated around, the smallmouth would be somewhere close.”
Neece said the fish on his best spot had actually slid out a few hundred yards from where he found them on Friday. He was able to relocate them with Garmin LiveScope, which he used to catch all of the fish he weighed in.
“(It was) one at a time casting a Damiki at them,” he said. “That’s basically it. You have to spend a lot of time on the trolling motor.”
Neece used a Damiki Armor Shad on a homemade jighead. He fished the rig with a 6-foot, 8-inch, medium-action G. Loomis IMX Pro spinning rod, a 2500-size Shimano Vanford spinning reel, 10-pound-test braided line and a 7-pound-test Sunline Super FC Sniper Fluorocarbon leader. He kept three identical combos on his deck, each rigged with a different color soft plastic.
“I varied between lighter and darker colors, and my fish were anywhere from the surface down to 20 feet of water,” Need said. “If you got it near one, he was coming for it.”
The top 10 boaters finished the tournament:
1st: Jimmy Neece, Jr., Bristol Tenn., five bass, 17-2, $4,720
2nd: Joseph Tallent, Knoxville, Tenn., five bass, 16-2, $2,360
3rd: Seth Barton, Middlesboro, Ky., five bass, 15-13, $1,574
4th: Trent Adkins, East Bernstadt, Ky., five bass, 15-10, $1,101
5th: Hunter McClaskey, Elizabethton, Tenn., five bass, 15-7, $944
6th: Zack Long, Clinton, Tenn., five bass, 15-6, $865
7th: John Napier, Middlesboro, Ky., five bass, 15-0, $747
7th: Riley Faulkner, Jacksboro, Tenn., five bass, 15-0, $747
9th: Seth Fricke, Oxford, Ohio, five bass, 14-12, $629
10th: Tim Saylor, Johnson City, Tenn., five bass, 14-11, $551
Complete results can be found at MajorLeagueFishing.com.
Dalton Noble of Hazard, Kentucky, caught a bass that weighed 4 pounds, 5 ounces, and earned the Big Bass Boater award of $695. Steve Farris of Lily, Kentucky, won the co-angler division and $1,088 Saturday, after bringing five bass to the scale that totaled 14 pounds, 2 ounces.
The top 10 co-anglers finished:
1st: Steve Farris, Lily, Ky., five bass, 15-1, $2,175
2nd: Scott Pittman, Powell, Tenn., five bass, 14-2, $1,088
3rd: Travis Malone, Wartburg, Tenn., five bass, 13-10, $976
4th: Cody Stokes, Ooltewah, Tenn., five bass, 12-14, $507
5th: Josh Smith, Siler, Ky., five bass, 11-13, $435
6th: Konnor Sweet, Abingdon, Va., five bass, 11-10, $399
7th: John Henley, Kingston, Tenn., five bass, 11-8, $344
7th: Ransom Boone, Marshall, N.C., five bass, 11-8, $344
9th: T.J. Blakely, Kingsport, Tenn., five bass, 11-5, $290
10th: Shane Bowman, Caryville, Tenn., five bass, 11-2, $254
Rob Welsh of Berea, Kentucky, earned the Berkley Big Bass co-angler award of $307, catching a bass that weighed in at 3 pounds, 11 ounces – the largest co-angler catch of the day.
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