Jesse Spellicy caught every fish that won him the Toyota Series Northern Division event on live sonar. The bait he did it with had been out of fashion on his home river for the better part of a decade.
The New York pro closed out three days on the St. Lawrence at Massena with 23 pounds, 6 ounces on Sunday, his biggest bag of the week, for a 64-13 total, a $73,689 cheque, his first Toyota Series trophy and an automatic berth in November's Toyota Series Championship. Louis Monetti finished second at 64-2, ahead of Clay Reece (63-4), Nolan Leger (61-14) and Brayden Stoker (61-13). Texas co-angler Carson Stone took the back-of-the-boat title with 50-1 after a 19-10 final bag.
This was not the St. Lawrence anglers usually get. The field was confined to the river proper below Iroquois Dam, with the 1000 Islands and Lake Ontario out of bounds — the water that normally produces the 25-pound smallmouth limits the venue is famous for. Dock talk before the start had the winning three-day weight around 62 pounds.
Spellicy lives in Gouverneur, about 40 minutes from the river, and the restricted boundary happened to fence him into the stretch he knows best.
"I knew it was going to be in my wheelhouse, that's the portion of the river that I'm the most familiar with," he said. "It's a little bit of an equalizer with LiveScope. I've always known there are big fish there, but it's very hard to fish traditionally. Incorporating LiveScope, it kind of unlocked that special area."
"When I realized that we were actually going to go fishing that day, I thought 'This is my chance to make up some ground'," Spellicy said. "I knew that the weights would drop on Day 2 anyways, but I had a feeling that I could catch at least 20 pounds and sustain."
The bait was a brown-back 3.6-inch Berkley MaxScent Flat Worm on a drop-shot, a No. 2 hook and a 3/8- or half-ounce weight — which, locally, reads as an antique.
"A lot of my local buddies think I'm joking when I mention a drop-shot," Spellicy said. "They haven't touched a drop-shot in five to seven years up here. But my 10-year-old daughter can catch 16, 17 pounds in a junior cup, dragging a Flat Worm around on obvious-looking stuff."
The week's other story led it. Byron Hill, an Australian cargo pilot and former Royal Australian Air Force fighter pilot who has fished only a handful of MLF events, opened with 24-10 of straight smallmouth to lead Day 1 in a tournament nobody expected to produce a bag that size.
Hill spent years on an Australian bream circuit before a pilot shortage brought him to the United States, and he reckons the transfer is more direct than it sounds. "Australian bream is similar to sheepshead, but it's all silver," he said. "They parallel very similar to smallmouth; they do everything the same as a smallmouth bass."
His method sits at the opposite end of the technology argument from the winner's. Hill fishes an ultra-finesse jighead and is not dependent on forward-facing sonar to find anything.
"It's just what I know. It's what I've done since I was 10," he said. "I'm never going to beat Kevin VanDam jerkbaiting, but I want to think I would have a chance beating him with the jighead — 'Scope or no 'Scope. I've been using the jighead well before 'Scope."
Jimmy Washam, a Tennessee River guide who specialises in smallmouth below tailraces, held the lead after two days at 44-3 before slipping out of the top five on the final day. He spent his limited Day 2 working within the event's three-hour forward-sonar window and then adjusting once it expired.
"It was not quick," Washam said. "The first hour and a half, maybe two hours, I caught three big ones. I caught a 5, a 4 1/2 and a 3 1/2 off that place, lost another big one." His last cull came after the sonar period closed.
Washam won a Toyota Series event and the $200,000 Pro Circuit TITLE in 2021 and has not lifted a trophy since. He was candid about what the drought has done.
"The way that fishing has moved so rapidly and there's so much new talent, I've kind of gone through a mental slump and feeling like maybe I'm not good enough anymore," he said. "And this week has already proven that I am."
Between the three of them — a winner who unlocked his water with LiveScope and a drop-shot, a leader who barely uses sonar at all, and a former champion working inside a sonar clock — the shrunken St. Lawrence produced a fairly complete argument about where tournament bass fishing currently sits.
