Brody Shelley (left) and Tanner Holguin of Carter’s Hornet Nation Anglers.
BY DAVE LINK
Brody Shelley and Tanner Holguin of Carter’s Hornet Nation Anglers thought they might have a difficult time catching big bass on Cherokee Lake in the April 25 event of the Bass Anglers Invitational Trail.
They got what they expected but persevered for their first victory on the high school bass circuit.
Shelley and Holguin had the five-bass limit weighing 11.47 pounds, winning the BAIT stop’s high school division by less than a half of a pound.
“I think we only caught six keepers all day,” said Holguin, a senior at Carter. “We didn’t get our fifth keeper probably until about 12 o’clock.”
At least they got six keepers. Holguin and Shelley didn’t have the best day of the tournament, though.
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Brody Bible and Sawyer Mynatt of Karns Middle caught five bass weighing 11.75 pounds and won the juniors division.
Shelley, a freshman at Carter, was happy with the results.
“It’s Cherokee, which is one of the tougher lakes around,” Shelley said, “but I thought we would catch quite a few more. But we were fortunate enough to catch keepers, for the most part.”
Shelley and Holguin were co-anglers this school year for the first time ever. Each has spent a lifetime fishing. Fishing and sports brought them together.
Shelley’s father, Ronnie, owns Tri-County Marine in Morristown, and Holguin’s father, Tony, bought a boat from there. That wasn’t their only connection.
“His brother wrestled on my wrestling team (at Carter) and we met there,” Tanner Holguin said.
Shelley and Holguin are heavily involved in other sports besides fishing.
Holguin wrestled for 11 years – including all four years of varsity at Carter – and played on the tennis team for three years.
Shelley is a point guard in basketball, and he’s serious about it. He plays AAU travel ball year around when he’s not playing for Carter. Although he likes fishing – maybe more than hoops – he will continue doing both.
“I’ve just been playing (basketball) for so long,” Shelley said. “Through the week, I’ll go (fishing) sometime after school. It’s just finding time to go out and practice (fishing) that’s hard.”
Holguin won’t have that problem in college. He signed with the Tennessee Tech Bass Fishing Team and will continue the sport he started long ago.
“Ever since I was basically born,” Holguin said.
But he doesn’t fish Cherokee Lake very often.
“We don’t fun fish it much just because it’s kind of a tougher lake,” Holguin said.
Holguin and his dad pre-fished Cherokee before the April 25 event, while Shelley was busy with basketball.
Practice day went OK for the Holguins – other than some mechanical issues.
“We found a lot of fish,” Tanner said. “We weren’t able to really catch too many because our battery died halfway through practice. We kind of found out where the fish were sitting and what they were wanting to do, so we kind of just implemented it on tournament day.”
As best they could.
Finding fish wasn’t the problem. Finding keeper bass was trouble.
“It’s a tough lake, but if you can find ’em, then you’re on ’em,” Shelley said. “You’ve just got to find size there is the only thing.”
Their winning bag consisted of three largemouth and two smallmouth bass. Their best bites came on an Alabama rig, also known as an “umbrella rig,” mostly casted over rocky bottom and banks.
“You could see ’em on the live scope,” Shelley said. “You would just reel it over the rocks, and (bass) would just come out of the rocks and hammer it.”
Shelley caught their big bass of the day on an Alabama rig. It weighed almost 3 pounds.
“It hit hard and put up quite a fight,” Shelley said.
When it was time for weigh-ins, Shelley and Holguin were hoping for the best. Maybe top 10. Perhaps even top 5.
Nope. First place.
Crews McFerrin and Colin Bourne of Karns weighed in five bass for 11.19 pounds, good for second place in the high school division and third overall.
“We didn’t expect the weights to be that low,” Holguin said. “Finally, everyone started coming in and they were like 5-, 10-pound bags, and that’s about it. There were a couple of kids we were worried about because we knew they could catch fish, but they were just short of us.”
Other top high school finishes were: third-place tie between Brodie Gibson and Kolbie Gibson of Chuckey Doak (five bass, 10.98 pounds) and Ainsley Lynn and Jaxon Passafiume of Karns (five bass, 10.98 pounds); fifth-place Wilson Shepherd and Hudson Mynatt of Karns (five bass, 10.77 pounds) and sixth-place Ty Mays and Mason Sziksai of Bell County (five bass, 9.88 pounds).
“When we came in, they said that almost no one had a (big) bag,” Shelley said. “When we heard that, we felt pretty good about our chances to at least get top three.”
In the juniors, Brody Sanders and Wyatt Wilson of Bell County were second (four bass, 9.75 pounds), ahead of third-place Elijah Russell and Levi Maples of Smoky Mountain Fishing (five bass, 8.74 pounds) and fourth-place Bryce Farmer and Colt James of Smoky Mountain Fishing (four bass, 8.49 pounds).
8-POUNDER! ANOTHER WIN!
Camdyn Cranfill and Turner Tharpe did it again.
The angling duo from the Kingston Fishing Team won their sixth tournament of the school year, clinching the Tennessee Bass Nation’s West division stop at Pickwick Lake on April 25.
Cranfill and Tharpe’s winning of five bass weighed 24.96 pounds and included an 8.7-pounder.
Finishing second were Logan Tolbert and Corbin Bornstein of Lipscomb Academy with five fish for 20.34 pounds, including a 4.8-pounder.
They were followed by third-place Tripp Mimms and Traveler Mimms of Sumner County (five bass, 17.21 pounds, 4.19-pounder), ahead of fourth-place Hunter Davis and Hank McIllwain of Music City Anglers (five bass, 16.53 pounds, 4.53-pounder) and fifth-place Brysen Whitaker and Easton Aaron of Henry County (five bass, 15.82 pounds, 4.23-pounder).
Tharpe and Cranfill have won three of the four TBN West events this season; they didn’t fish one of the tournaments.