By Alan McGuckin
By the time the scales stopped spinning at West Point Lake,
Kevin VanDam felt like he’d been sitting between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for
four days on a west Georgia roller coaster ride.
KVD posted up and down daily limits ranging in weight from
23-pounds on Day 2 to 7-pounds on the final day. In the end, he posted his third Top 12 in
five events thus far this season, finishing this one in seventh place.
The man who virtually expects to win every time he launches
his boat, made no excuses for coming up a little short at West Point.
“You gotta capitalize on the conditions every day, and I
didn’t do that,” said VanDam in a matter of fact fashion.
“My best pattern throughout the week was throwing a Strike
King Shadalicious swimbait around isolated stumps and laydowns in shallow water,”
VanDam said. “I rigged it with a 3/8-ounce Mustad swimbait hook, and threw it
on 17-pound XPS fluorocarbon line with a Quantum 6.6:1 Tour KVD reel and a
7-foot, 2-inch TKVD medium-heavy action rod. I like that particular reel with swimbaits because it helps me slow down
to the perfect speed for that bait.
“I went out there to win today, but I didn’t have a single
keeper at nearly 11:00 a.m., so I tried to pull off a last-minute miracle with
the square bill and my cranking system. I caught a fast limit with it, but not
nearly enough weight.”
“This lake has been like Jekyll and Hyde,” he said in
summation on the weigh-in stage before climbing into his Toyota Tundra and
heading north five hours to Lake Murray with hopes of finding a reservoir with
a consistently more congenial personality.
