Lucas Punkari
For someone who had never competed in an FLW Everstart Southeast Series event prior to last weekend, Fort Frances angler Bryan Gustafson’s 71st-place finish out of 163 anglers on Lake Okeechobee in Florida is something the 23-year-old could be proud of.
“It’s great to be able to do that in my first time out,” Gustafson said.
“It was awesome to be down there and I had a great time, plus I learned a whole lot, as well, on how to fish there,” he added.
“But I just didn’t learn how to adapt to some of the conditions that we were presented with.”
One of those situations occurred on the very first day of competition last Thursday, when anglers found themselves facing totally different weather conditions than what they had grown accustomed to during pre-fishing.
“A huge cold front with 25 m.p.h. winds came through on that first day and it basically turned the lake into a big mud puddle,” Gustafson explained.
“I definitely had to switch my strategy up with everything that was going on,” he noted. “And even though I couldn’t quite figure everything out, I managed to catch a few fish.”
Gustafson ended up reeling in five bass that first day which weighed in at 10.9 pounds, with his biggest tipping the scales at 5.25 pounds.
That put him in 37th position overall—despite losing two fish right off the hop.
“In the first hour alone, I had lost a six-pounder and a five-pounder, and my co-angler in the boat [Roger Helm] asked, ‘You going to be all right, kid?’” Gustafson recalled.
“But that’s what happens when you are fishing in thick vegetation like they have down there, and I just have to learn how to deal with it a little bit better,” he reasoned.
On the second day of competition Friday, Gustafson was hoping to make it into the top 68 anglers who received purse money but only could catch four fish that weighed in at 5.13 pounds.
“The only way that you can catch giants down there, when they are not on beds, is just go flipping and try to catch five big ones,” he remarked.
“I didn’t get any of the big ones on the second day, but I didn’t miss any fish, either, out there.
“I made all of the decisions that I thought were the right ones, and I went to all of the areas that I did well in pre-fishing, but it just wasn’t meant to be,” Gustafson reasoned.
That left him with a two-day total weight of 16.06 pounds, which not only ended any chance of fishing on the third and final day on Saturday but also saw him finish just three spots back of earning $1,000 for his efforts.
“I just missed out by 3/100ths of a pound,” Gustafson noted.
“Had I known that going into the weigh-ins, I might have done things a little bit differently and gone after some 13-inch smallmouths as they were pretty much everywhere,” he said.
“But when I came in there, I thought that I did everything that I could have done.”
One of the things Gustafson learned during the event was how to fish in the thick vegetation on Lake Okeechobee—something that anglers don’t encounter that often in the lakes around Sunset Country.
“It’s nothing remotely like what we have back home,” he explained. “You’re not going to get many bites, so you have to make sure that your head is in the game all day when you are out there.
“And then when you do hook a big one, you really need to figure out how to get out of the vegetation, how to position your boat to get to the fish, and to also make sure that you don’t get your hook caught in anything,” Gustafson added.
“The biggest thing, though, in these event is that you can’t lose any fish,” he stressed.
“Back home, you can come back if you lose a couple of fish, but it just hurts you down there when that happens.”
At the moment, Gustafson is heading to Arkansas to get a new boat (a Legend Alpha 211) for this year, which he will be using in his next FLW Southeast Series event, which will take place March 22-24 on Lake Seminole in Georgia.
“I’m really excited about getting that boat. And once I do that, I have to get all of my Hummingbird and Minn Kota gear on there,” he joked.
“Once that is done, though, I’ll begin all my homework on Lake Seminole,” he added.
