Leavellwood Lodge as seen on ESPN outdoors many, many times. You have probably seen Jimmy Houston, Hank Parker, and many other pro-anglers fish Leavellwood. The Bass fishing there is slightly beyond astonishing!
Trey Montgomery, Leavellwood's owner has five or six small lakes on the property ranging from 5 acres up to about 50 acres. They are intensely managed for Largemouth bass. Leavellwood has stocked both Florida strain and northern strain fish and they have consistent catches of 10 pounders.
This trip began a little rocky, just travelling with a stack of fishing rods is strange enough, but when the rods arrived and my other bag didn't, I was a little concerned. As it turned out one of the other competitors, Brady Stueve from South Dakota, had a delayed flight anyway. So between my lost bag, and Brady's delay, then having to pick up a boat for use in the show, Trey and I had quite the sightseeing tour of Birmingham Alabama. We ate at the Golden Rule Barbeque and visited Mark's Outdoors, where they sold me enough plastic worms to fish for three weeks.
Brady finally arrived, my bag was found and the Nitro Boat retrieved from the dealer, we were on our way. When we finally arrived at the lodge, Jessica had already done much of her camera work. This would be the first show in which there would be more than two competitors, with two moving on to the finalists show.
We met our "judges" that evening at the lodge:
Woo Daves is a professional Bass fisherman from Tidewater Virginia. He was the 2000 BassMaster Classic Champ and has a string of other titles to his credit that equal about three printed pages. The man has forgotten more about Bass fishing than most of us will ever know.
Chris Daves is also a professional bass fisherman. his resume is not as long as his dad's but he is an excellent fisherman in his own right. He has had two Classic appearances and has placed in the money in both bassmaster and FLW tour events. He is fast on the heels of his famous Dad.
Mr. Paul is one of the Leavellwood pro's. I appologize for not listing your last name Paul, but I don't think we were formally introduced. Anyway, Mr. Paul is some of the muscle behind leavellwood. He helped Trey with the lakes setup and has been involved with the Lodge since the beginning. His unmatched local knowledge, really helped boat some nice fish.
Because Jessica was able to get to the lodge before Brady and I, she was paired with Paul. She started her filming the first afternoon. Brady and I would flip for position and partner. I won the first flip so I chose to fish earliest. Brady won the second flip and chose to fish with Woo.
Chris Daves and I headed out soon after sun up to take on the Leavellwood largemouth. We tried to catch fish on the top water bite, but the sun was too high when we started and day too warm. So we stuck to plastic worms. Specifically a midnight blue 6" Zoom worm with a speed tail. We managed to catch several fish.
Brady and Woo went next, and fished for a couple of hours. By the time we had gotten enough footage, it was lunchtime and we were all shuffled back to the lodge. Wayne was there by this time.
After lunch it was crunch time. Wayne sat us all down on the fireplace hearth and told us that he recognized that we were all pretty nervous. We were each given a little constructive criticism and told we had to step up! So that afternoon we were shuffled back to the lake, put in front of the cameras again and left to our own devices.
Luckily Chris and I got along very well, I let him take the lead in what we were doing, then got him talking. I stopped worrying about catching fish and concentrated on getting him to talk about what I was doing wrong. As it turns out, we captured on of the best worm fishing lessons ever caught on film, then on the first cast, after the lesson I caught a 4 1/2 pounder! On tape! the biggest on film fish that week. I felt pretty good about the way things worked out!