Mercury pro Ott Defoe claims first Elite Series win on Mississippi River
LA CROSSE, Wisconsin – Mercury pro Arthur “Ott” Defoe remembers the moment like it was yesterday: the 1996 Bassmaster Classic in Birmingham, Alabama, where Arkansas pro George Cochran beat a brutal early-August Alabama heat wave and captured his second Classic title. He also captured the imagination of a 9-year-old boy from Tennessee attending his first Classic, sending young Otter off on a lifetime pursuit to catch fish for a living.
“I was 9 years old; that was the first Classic I ever saw, and I knew right then and there that I wanted to be a professional bass fisherman,” Defoe admitted as he stood onstage this weekend at Veterans Freedom Park in La Crosse, Wisconsin, cradling the winner’s trophy from the Plano Bassmaster Elite at the Mississippi River. “I thought it was the coolest thing, seeing all these famous pros and getting their autographs. From that day, I was going to be a bass pro, and there was no convincing me otherwise.”
The amiable Knoxville-based pro has done an admirable job, earning Elite Series Rookie of the Year honors in 2011, racking up just short of $1 million in tournament winnings, claiming a pair of B.A.S.S. victories and qualifying for six Classics in his six-year Elite career. An Elite title had eluded Defoe, though, a fact that he remedied with 12 pounds, 1 ounce on Championship Sunday, just enough to hold off Minnesota pro Seth Feider in the final regular-season event of the 2016 Elite Season.
Defoe – who won the 2011 All-Star Championship and a Northern Open in 2014—racked up 63-10 over four days to Feider’s 62-7, including the biggest fish of the event, a 6-pound, 1-ounce largemouth on Day 2.
“You catch a 6-pounder on the Mississippi River, you have to believe that it was just meant to be,” Defoe said. “You just don’t see many fish that size on this river. It’s a great fishery, but a 6-pounder is pretty rare.”
Mercury teammate Swindle lends a helping hand
Defoe’s victory nearly disappeared into the Mississippi’s rapidly rising waters on Championship Sunday, though. For the first three days of the tournament, he had relied on a two-spot pattern that produced fish like clockwork, fishing below a spillway close to the ramp in the morning, and them jumping downriver to a large grassy area to finish out the afternoon, catching solid 2- to 3-pound keepers on both spots daily.
On the final day of the tournament, however, Defoe’s spillway bite disappeared as the Wisconsin late-summer weather shifted, leaving him with zero fish by 9:30 a.m. while Feider caught fish in an early flurry to steal the lead. And that’s when Mercury teammate Gerald Swindle happened by, idling up to Defoe’s boat and asking him how his day was going.
“Gerald could tell I wasn’t happy,” Defoe admitted. “I told him that I hadn’t had a single bass bite all morning, and he pointed me to the area he had just left where keeper-size smallmouth were still biting. He described the area to me and suggested some baits that he had caught them on.”
Swindle’s advice paid off as Defoe boated his first keeper at 10 a.m. and then rallied with four more solid fish over the next five hours.
“Gerald is leading the Angler of the Year race and could use every point he can get,” Defoe said. “He didn’t have to do that for me, but I darn sure appreciate it.”
Otter runs the Mississippi River “slalom”
Even though Defoe’s spillway spot was a small handful of miles upstream from the La Crosse ramp, it covered some of the trickiest water on the river. Defoe would leave Veterans Freedom Park and idle for seven minutes through a long no-wake zone, and then put the pedal to the metal on his Nitro Z-21 powered by a Mercury 250hp Pro XS. Defoe’s path to the spillway was a short 8-minute hop, but through a series of corners and logjams that significantly slowed the rest of the Mississippi’s fishing traffic.
“That spillway was a slalom course, it was not an easy run,” Defoe said. “I had to make real tight corners to get around a bunch of shallow sand bars and logs, and I ran it pretty hard. That combination of the Mercury 250 Pro XS on the back of a great boat allowed me to run those corners way quicker than anybody else fishing that river.”
Defoe’s shallow-water navigation was enhanced by his propeller, which he had wisely switched out prior to the tournament.
“I was running a four-blade Mercury Bravo prop, which really helps in those situations where you’re forced to make those hard corners as fast as I needed to,” he said. “I put that prop on specifically for this tournament because I wanted a really quick hole shot. A lot of the places you fish on this river are really, really shallow and you have to have a fast hole shot to get up on plane, so you can get over those shallow spots. The Bravo prop was a perfect combination with that Pro XS motor to run the river like I needed to.”
NOTES: Defoe has proved to be one of the most consistent anglers on the Elite tour in his six years of competition, finishing in the Top 20 in exactly half his tournaments (40 of 80) … Swindle, the 2004 AOY winner, left La Crosse with a 43-point lead in the 2016 AOY race, with only the Angler of the Year Championship event remaining … Mercury pro Drew Benton leads the Rookie of the Year race by an astounding 152 points (he has 672 to fellow Mercury pro Adrian Avena’s 544) … the AOY Championship will be held Sept. 15-18 on Mille Lacs Lake in Mille Lacs, Minnesota.
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