| | After a stellar year with boat numbers up and high angler enthusiasm, we have arrived at the 2011 FLW Championship. Each of the 40 pros and 40 co-anglers has their own story and took a different road to get here.
 Jeff Graves almost didn’t fish the tour at all. Hailing from Chagrin Falls, OH, Graves thought about entering the first event of the year on Lake Erie as a co-angler. His friends convinced him to enter as a pro and the rest is history as Graves went on to not only to win the event, but fish the rest of the tour. Now he is in Bismarck with 39 other great pros fishing the Missouri River.
“This year has just been dynamic. Going from not knowing if I was going to fish one tournament, to fishing all four and now being here at the championship, which I’m super excited about. The FLW is a super organization. Everything has been professional all the way and I’m happy to be a part of it,” said Graves.
“I’ve never been this far west, although we did fish South Dakota, but that’s different from up here. It changes daily here. The water clarity is something I’m learning to deal with,” said Graves. “The shifting sand and the sand bars are fun to hit when you don’t know that you are going to hit them. Just finding fish has been a challenge, but we’ll get them.”
 While this is the second championship for Danny Steffens, who almost wasn’t able to fish this year due to an accident that burned his legs, being here just makes him grin from ear to ear. “I’m just excited,” he said. “The year started out amazing being on top day one at Lake Erie. Then after that I was kind of in the middle. I try to be in that top ten, because if you are not in the top ten you are just average. I don’t want to be average ladies and gentlemen.” While the weather has been brutal during prefishing, Steffens is hopeful that he can put together a plan that will put him in the top ten on the last day and give him a shot at $50,000 plus contingencies that could amount to another $20,000.
No stranger to championships is Chris Gilman, who is fishing his fifth here since 1998. “Amazingly some of the giant sandbars are washed away,” he commented. “The water is dropping significantly fast, and every day you have to adjust. The guys that scramble are going to do really well. There are also a lot of big fish in here, it’s going to be a fantastic weigh-in and I expect it to be very close. There is a lot of river that has no fish but some of the stretches have a lot. Once you find a pod of them, they are fairly easy to catch. They are hungry and feeding. They are bulking up for fall.”
With temperatures in the low 30’s, boats took off at 8am from Hazelton Boat Ramp. They will begin returning at 4pm today with temperatures in the low 60’s with light winds. Weigh-in will begin at 5pm at the Bismarck Civic Center. Stay tuned to Walleye Central for more coverage. |
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