Lewis and Beckman Win Truman

Over the past weekend, the American Crappie Trail’s final regular season tournament took place on Truman Lake in the Missouri Ozarks, as anglers battled it out for over $55,000 in cash and prizes. Heavy rainfall the week prior to the tournament brought the lake’s water level up considerably and caused most popular fishing areas to become muddy, leading many anglers to abandon vertical jigging, the staple tactic on Truman, and adapt to spider-rigging minnows, which produced a more consistent bite. With the top ten day-one weights within one pound of one another, and with one-polers and spider-riggers throughout, the winning team was as closely contested as the winning tactic. The conclusion played out as many believe it should have, with Truman living up to its reputation and giving up the first and third place weights to vertical jig fishermen against the best field of spider-riggers in the country.

Local pros Jeff Lewis and Matt Beckman have won at Truman before, but with only 9.44 pounds on day one, placing them 1.5 pounds out of first and in sixteenth place, they had a long way to go to reach the top. The Jenko Fishing team spider-rigged briefly the first morning, but quickly returned to one-poling, their bread-and-butter, and put together a solid stringer of fish. Day two they stuck to one-poling, catching most of their fish on darker colors with a 1/16-ounce head. “We went with the smaller head and slowed down and just put our heads down,” said Beckman. “Yesterday they were up in the water column, six to seven feet down, and today they just sunk down, and they were nine to ten feet down.” Their day two weight of 11.01 pounds was enough to propel them to a 20.45-pound total, taking first place, and winning the anglers a Ranger RT188c worth $25,000.

With 20.15 pounds, second place went to a team that is no stranger to the winner’s circle: Travis and Charlie Bunting. The team recently sold their Ranger sponsored boat and were prefishing without electronics, which Travis felt worked in their favor. “Normally, on a lake like this that we know well, we’d have 100 spots to fish, but because we didn’t have the new boat ready, we stuck around one spot and grinded it out and caught 10.56 on day one,” said Travis. “Day two we caught two tournament fish off that spot, and probably stayed too long before moving and fishing areas we’d caught fish in the past. We caught most of our fish on day two spider-rigging big stumps. We used our Humminbird 360, which made a heck of a difference fishing those submerged stumps; the detail on the new Solix is just tremendous.” The B’n’M team won $6,700 for second place.

Jim Dant and Donny Zufall have been successfully vertical jigging crappie tournaments for decades, and their first ACT tourney on Zufall’s home lake was no different. The dirty water was not an issue for the veteran team, who were leading the field on day one with a weight of 10.91 pounds. “The water clarity doesn’t matter, they eat all the time, you just have to figure out what color it takes to make them eat and what depth they’re at,” said Zufall. Just like the first and second place teams, Dant and Zufall figured out that the fish moved down on day two, and their 19.96 total-weight proved good enough for third place and $4,500.