Jaxson Pierce and Tucker Larrance of the Jefferson County High Bass Fishing Team after winning on Kentucky Lake.
BY DAVE LINK
Tucker Larrance and Jaxson Pierce were having an average Friday of practice on Kentucky Lake before the Tennessee BASS Nation’s State Open Trail stop.
Then the bite changed overnight for the two juniors on the Jefferson County High School Bass Team.
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Larrance and Pierce brought in a five-bass limit of largemouth weighing 17.10 pounds, winning the first stop of the TBN State Open Trail on Sept. 6 by one-tenth of an ounce.
It’s the first TBN high school victory for Pierce and Larrance and the first win ever for the Jefferson County High Bass Team.
On Nov. 12, 2022, Pierce and Larrance won the juniors division of the TBN’s Bass Pro Shops stop on Cherokee Lake when they were eighth graders at Maury Middle School in Dandridge. They’ve been fishing together since the third grade.
“It was great,” Pierce said of their recent win. “We’ve had some good finishes, but we haven’t been top three. We’ve had a couple of top 10s and stuff.”
And it started with a ho-hum day of practice, one day before the tournament win.
“We scrambled around (in practice) and ran out of gas in the boat,” Larrance said. “We ran a whole tank and didn’t catch many fish. We caught a couple of little ones that didn’t really count, and then we stumbled across one or two good ones and were like, ‘Well, I guess we’ll just follow that pattern the next day and see what we do in the tournament.’
“And then it all turned around that morning and we finally started catching some.”
Their winning bag included a 5.35-pounder caught by Pierce that Saturday morning.
Pierce and Larrance were among the first anglers taking off that Saturday, so they were among the first back to the dock for weigh-ins. It was a long wait for the two anglers to see if they won – or the team won.
They did so by the narrowest margin over Camden Randall and James Roop of Mt. Pleasant High Bass Team, whose five-bass limit weighed 17.09 pounds, including a 4.83-pounder.
“It was close, super close,” Pierce said. “I thought we were going to do good, but I didn’t realize we were going to win. And then (Randall-Roop) weighed that in, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s going to be a lot closer than I thought.’ ”
Third place went to Camdyn Cranfill and Turner Tharpe of Kingston High Fishing (five bass, 16.05 pounds, 4.85-pounder). Jefferson County’s Grant Arnold and Ethan Rose were 29th (three bass, 6.78 pounds).
Of the 133 boats entered, only 15 caught the five-bass limit and many finished with one or no keepers.
After the Friday practice, Pierce thought they might be one of those boats.
“We caught fish,” Pierce said, “but I didn’t think we were on the winning fish.”
At least one thing changed overnight. The weather. It got a little cooler, cloudy, and there was some rain.
“It was kind of weird,” Larrance said. “It had been a little hot, and I think the fish were a little deeper than we had thought they were going to be, and then it rained and cooled it down a little bit, and I think they finally got up a little shallower where we thought they were going to target them and do pretty good.
“We came in that pocket that we’d practiced in, and it had cooled down, we’d noticed the water temperature and kind of the clarity was a little different, and all of sudden, it just clicked. We caught a couple of fish in the first few casts, and after that happened, we kept pushing through the day and it all fell in the right spot.”
They took off at 6:30 a.m. and had about a 30-minute run to the spot they marked in practice.
Larrance said they had five or six keepers by 7:30 in the morning.
Pierce hooked into the big bass mid-morning.
“I caught it on a chatter bait on a piece of wood, submerged in the water,” he said. “There was a bunch of wood, a crappie trap. It was a bunch of pieces of wood sticking out of the water people put in there for crappie, and I threw over next to it. It friggin’ smoked it.”
Larrance knew something was up when the big bass hit Pierce’s chatter bait.
“All of a sudden, he’s like, ‘Uh oh, here’s one,’” Larrance said. “And he’s like, ‘It’s a big ’un, it’s a big ’un. Get the net.’
“I got the net, and he reeled that thing in and I was like, ‘Gah, lee, that’s like a 5.’ That was our first big-fish encounter on that (Kentucky Lake). We knew they were in there, and everybody had been talking about ’em, but we’d never really seen that there were bigger fish until then, and we were like, ‘Well, maybe we fell into the right spot today.’ ”
They caught their bigger fish on chatter baits and some on swim baits, using a live scope and fishing over brush piles, many of them made by crappie fishermen.
It was their first taste of success on Kentucky Lake, which is located in middle Tennessee between Clarksville and Paris.
“We’ve never done real good up there, not like this time,” Pierce said.
Although they haven’t won a tournament since middle school, Larrance and Pierce have been successful on the TBN Tour, qualifying for the Bassmaster Nationals this past summer at Clarks Hill Lake in Georgia.
They’re at it again this weekend on Watts Bar Lake for the TBN’s new Bass Anglers Invitational Trail (BAIT) Series, which has replaced the TBN’s Bass Pro Shops Trail Series (although Bass Pro Shops is a BAIT Series sponsor).
“We’re ready to carry the momentum over there (to Watts Bar),” Larrance said. “We’ve been there every year we’ve fished, so we’ve got a lot of history there.
“We’ve done pretty good, had top fives, top tens. We’ve come close to winning, but we’re ready to carry the momentum and see if we can’t bring in another win there.”