“Break out a Lucky Craft Flat CB D-20 and go to work scouring ledges,” noted Lucky Craft team member Brent Ehrler at the FLW Tour event on Fort Loudoun-Tellico Lakes last week.

And that’s exactly what he and several other Lucky Craft team members did to find fish in what turned out to be a classic summertime TVA impoundment ledge battle in Tennessee.

With the water temperatures in the 80s and most of the fish in deep-water summertime mode, the dominant pattern was cranking and dragging Fort Loudoun Lake’s offshore ledges in 10 to 20 feet of water.

Ehrler turned in the best performance of the Lucky Craft staff last week. His consistent daily limits of 12 pounds, 6 ounces on day one and 12 pounds, 15 ounces on day two garnered him a 15th-place finish with a two-day total of 25 pounds, 5 ounces.

Though Ehrler began the tournament fishing shallow, he eventually conceded to the deep-water bite in the end.

“I thought I had a pretty decent shallow-water pattern going on laydown logs along the bank,” Ehrler recounted. “But by 1 o’clock on the first day, I had only caught two little keepers, and I knew I had to change.”

So Ehrler headed for a railroad bridge that crossed the front of a creek and began working the ends of the trestle bed.

That move produced an immediate 4-pounder and two other fish which closed out his day-one limit.

“Where the trestle bed dumped out into the water, there was a sizeable flat ledge in about 13 feet of water, and that’s where the fish were sitting,” Ehrler described.

On the morning of day two, Ehrler headed straight for the railroad bridge and promptly caught a 3-pounder and a 4-pounder on the Lucky Craft Flat CB D-20.

“I decided right then I was going to spend the rest of the day on that one spot,” Ehrler said. “That’s not really my style – camping on one spot like that all day – but I had nothing else to go to. It was the best deep spot I had found, and I figured during the course of the day, it would produce at least three more keepers.”

“It was brutal to sit there and cast to the same spot all day,” he continued. “I alternated between the D-20, a wacky-rigged worm on a jighead and a Carolina rig. And just about the time I’d tell myself I needed to move, my co-angler or myself would get a bite, and it would keep us there.

“There were not a lot of fish there so the bite was painfully slow, but the fish did seem to have some better quality.”

In the end, Ehrler’s hole-camping strategy worked as he boated four more keepers off the trestle bed to finish his limit on day two.

Ehrler now sits in ninth place in the FLW Tour Angler of the Year points race going into the final event at Detroit.

Gagliardi got off to a solid start on day one with a limit weighing 10 pounds, 13 ounces, but he only brought in three bass on day two for 7 pounds, 9 ounces.

It’s not like Gagliardi to leave something on the table in a tournament where so many bass are being caught. Normally such a finish would be disappointing to him, but given his overall 2008 goal of accumulating points to guarantee him a spot in the Forrest Wood Cup on his home lake of Lake Murray, he said he can live with 54th.

“I’m now in seventh place in the points, which basically locks me into the Cup,” Gagliardi said. “I said all year I was going to play it a little on the conservative side to build up as many points as I could. I did not want to have to go into Detroit under the gun to make the Championship. Now I’ve got some breathing room at Detroit; I can fish the way I want to fish without the Cup berth hanging over my head.”

As for Fort Loudoun-Tellico, Gagliardi fished deep.

His day one limit came on a Spot Remover teamed with a Lake Fork Twitch Worm fished along a deep ledge. He later culled up three times on a hump using a big spoon.

Gagliardi’s deep bite waned dramatically on day two.

“I don’t know what happened – it’s one of the weirdest things I’ve seen fishing deep,” he said. “I did not get a bite off the ledge that produced a limit the first day. Then I went to my hump, and it was void of fish, too. It was like the deep bite just completely died.”

The deep bite was so bad, Gagliardi actually went shallow with a jig for a few hours, but that didn’t pan out either.

“At the end of the day I decided to go back to the hump that produced my three culls the day before to see if I could be a hero in the last hour. I did end up catching three pretty decent ones on the spoon, but I never finished out my limit.”

Gabe Bolivar turned in a 61st-place finish at Fort Loudoun-Tellico Lakes by catching daily limits of 9 pounds, 13 ounces and 8 pounds for a two-day total of 17 pounds, 13 ounces.

All of Bolivar’s fish came deep on day one.

“I found one really good structure spot in practice,” he said. “It was an underwater point that tapered off into about 20 feet of water on the end. I fished that spot all day the first day with a Flat CB D-20 and a Texas-rigged 10-inch Berkley Power worm, and it produced a decent limit.”

But when Bolivar returned to his primary point on day two, his well had run dry.

“I never got a bite off it,” he said. “By 9:30 a.m., I started to freak out because my best place was dead, and I really had nothing else to go to.”

Bolivar, who is on the bubble for making the Forrest Wood Cup, could feel his entire 2008 season beginning to slip away.

“I knew if I finished in the hundreds in this tournament, my Championship chances were toast,” he said. “I had to get something going.”

At that moment, Bolivar put his cranking rod down, trolled over to the bank where a laydown log had been teasing him all day.

“This one log on the bank looked so good, so I pulled out a jig and flipped to it,” he related. “I caught a keeper on that first flip and that told me what I was going to do the rest of the day: fish laydowns.”

From there, Bolivar developed his pattern on the fly. He began swimming a 5/8-ounce Pepper jig trimmed with a Berkley Chigger Craw through the limbs of laydown trees.

“Contacting the limbs was critical,” Bolivar revealed. “Whenever I’d run the jig into the limbs, a bass would come up and eat it. I think the bass were feeding on small bluegills around those laydowns. I dyed the tips of my green pumpkin trailer chartreuse and that seemed to help the bite.”

While Bolivar admits that his day-two catch of 8 pounds may not look impressive to most people, it was very important to him.

“That was one of the coolest days of tournament fishing I’ve ever had,” he explained. “I started running a pattern in the tournament that I never even tried in practice. I was completely fishing from the hip, and it worked. I’ve never done that, and it helped give me confidence to trust myself with taking those risks a little more.

“Plus, I held my ground in qualifying for the Cup. I’m currently 54th in the points going into Detroit, so at least the Championship is still in my sights. If I had stayed out there on that deep spot and died, I wouldn’t be able to say that.

Though Stacey King did not finish in the money with his 88th-place showing, he did win the big bass award of $750 for weighing in the biggest bass on day one.

King said bigger bass fit into his Fort Loudoun game plan because he sought quality over quantity.

“I really tried to fish isolated, out-of-the-way places that were not getting as much pressure rather than get out there and play take-a-number on those community ledges,” King said. “I stayed on the lower end of Loudoun fishing bluff ends, clay points and ledges. Those kinds of places didn’t have the numbers of fish like those ledges way up the river where a lot of the leaders were fishing, but they did have some quality bass on them. The first day I only caught two bass, and they weighed 9 pounds and an ounce.”

King’s big bass lures included a Berkley 10-inch Power worm and a small crankbait.

“That big bass on day one came on the Power Worm,” he noted.

“The biggest mistake I made in this tournament was not going farther up the lake,” he added. “That’s where a lot of the bass were caught. I stayed in the lower end and the numbers just weren’t there.”

Joe Thomas bucked the deep-fishing trend by going shallow for the Fort Loudoun event. He wound up in 90th place with a two-day total of 15 pounds, 2 ounces. “I tried to fish out deep during practice, but I couldn’t get anything going out there,” Thomas said. “So come tournament time, I just got on the bank and went fishing. “I ran way up the river and fished anything that created shade: docks, shady banks, laydowns, overhanging bushes and stuff like that.

“I caught a couple each day on a Lucky Craft RC 1.5 in a copper green color, and the rest came on a 5/8-ounce jig with a Berkley Chigger Craw on the back.”

Thomas weighed in 6 pounds the first day and 9 pounds, 9 ounces the day two.

“I had a few missed opportunities the first day that cost me,” he said. “The second day, I got most everything in the boat, and it showed with a little better weight. If I could have done that the first day, I’d have been right there for a decent check.”

Like Thomas, Yamamoto chose to forgo the deep-ledge fishing and instead focus his efforts shallower.

“I tried fishing deep in practice with little success,” Yamamoto said. “On the first day of the tournament I had a late boat draw so I opted to fish shallow and close [to the takeoff]. I had one decent day in practice fishing laydown logs on bluffs, and that’s the plan I went with on day one. I used a 4-inch swimming Senko to fish the laydowns. I caught quite a few fish, but only two of them were keepers.”

With little success on day one, Yamamoto decided to run to a marina on day two.

“My co-angler on day two was in 12th place, and I wanted him to catch some fish and make the top 10, so we went to a marina up the river,” he said. “We both caught limits by wacky rigging a 4-inch Senko on one of my 1/8-ounce jigheads, and he did make the top 10. A lot of the fish were suspended under the marina piers and boats, and the slow fall of the small Senko got their attention.”

Yamamoto, who enjoys teaching people about fishing as much as he enjoys catching fish himself, put on a Senko “clinic” of sorts for marina bystanders.

“One neat thing that happened that day was I taught a few people how to catch bass,” he explained. “There were three ladies staying in a houseboat parked at the marina. They saw us catching all these bass, and they asked how to do it. So I gave them some of my Senkos and jigheads and showed them what to do. They tied on my baits and started fishing them around the docks. Pretty soon they were catching bass, too, and they were thrilled with it. So if nothing else, I made some new friends at that marina.”