Columbus native David Wright and Bret Cunningham of Seymour have punched their ticket to compete in the 2018 Crappie USA Classic national competition after placing third at last weekend’s CUSA tournament on Lake Monroe near Bloomington.
The top three teams qualified for the CUSA Classic that will held in October on Lake Cumberland in Kentucky. Wright and Cunningham won the $500 third-place prize and were awarded an additional $500 for catching the biggest crappie of the day that weighed 2.23 pounds.
Each team had to fish from within a boat and had nine hours to catch as many fish as they could to see who would provide the heaviest combined weight of each pair’s top seven crappie. Wright and Cunningham’s top seven weighed 7.95 pounds, which was three-tenths of a pound lighter than the winning team’s 8.25 pounds.
“Monroe can be a very tough lake, especially when the water is dropping and the fish are trying to spawn,” Cunningham said. “It kind of forces them to move around. We were just fortunate enough to try to get in some of those transition areas and find some decent fish.”
Wright and Cunningham used both live bait and artificial bait to catch their crappie. They used a method of fishing called spider rigging with their live bait. The spider rigging method included a 14 foot rod to get the bait out in front of the boat because they were fishing in shallow water. They vertical jigged with the artificial bait and caught their biggest fish using a Nothead feather jig.
“You want that bait out in front of the boat away so the boat itself does not split the fish,” Wright said of their spider rigging method. “When we vertical jigged, we used nine- and 10-foot long rods to jig some stumps in an old laid out tree that had fallen into the water years ago.”
Wright said it was a slow day for finding quality fish to start out, but the weather held up for a good fishing day. The competition started at 6:30 a.m., and it wasn’t until around 1 p.m. when they caught the winning fish. The duo caught 25 total fish in the nine hours, and all the fish had to be crappie.
The national tournament in October will be the same format, except it will be a two-day competition instead of one. Each team will weigh its biggest seven fish on Day 1 and again on Day 2, with the winners being decided by the combined weight of each day.
Both Wright and Cunningham are looking forward to competing in the national competition.
“Crappie USA is an outstanding organization,” Wright said. “They foster good sportsmanship and just a great organization to be associated with.”
