By John Johnson
BassFan Senior Editor
Lay Lake is one of three lower Coosa River impoundments that Dustin Connell calls his home waters. Until last week, it was his least-favorite of the trio that also includes lakes Mitchell and Jordan.
"Lay had kind of been my nemesis in the past," said the Clanton, Ala. resident, who on Sunday achieved his second MLF REDCREST Championship victory with a dominant final-round performance on that venue. "It was good to get some revenge on that lake.
"I've had a lot of (local and regional) tournaments there where things just fizzled out on me. I used to never really click with it, but now it's my favorite lake on the whole system."
The victory was his second in three MLF outings this year (he also triumphed in the Bass Pro Tour season opener at Toledo Bend Reservoir). With the $300,000 REDCREST payday, his earnings total for the year is already a hefty $410,000.
For the second time this year, he pulled within one of pal Jacob Wheeler's standard for most career BPT wins (this was his sixth).
"What I really want to do is catch up to him in those (BassFan) World Rankings," he said in reference to Wheeler's five-year hold on the stop slot. "That would be sweet."
How he approached a body of water he knows extremely well last week has been well-documented. Despite being one of the game's foremost practitioners of forward-facing sonar, he pretty much ignored the lake's enormous population of suspended spotted bass for the first three days, instead doing most of his damage with a scrounger head and a spinnerbait (both with Crush City Freeloader trailers) in the swift current below the Logan Martin dam.
He finally went to the lower end to start the Championship Round and landed on a pod of fish in an area the approximate size of a football field that might've numbered in the triple digits, including lots in the 3-pound class and some over 4. They'd set up there just recently (they weren't around when he checked the locale during practice) and were easy pickings for an angler with his supreme FFS skills.
He caught 28 scoreable fish (2 pounds or heavier), all on a Crush City Mooch Minnow in gizzard shad attached to a 3/16-ounce VMC tungsten swimbait head, that combined to weigh 83 pounds. Both the bait and the jighead are set for release this summer at ICAST.
He far outdistanced runner-up Alton Jones Jr., who tallied 52-2 on 19 fish. His smashing success was a big psychological relief.
"I put more pressure on myself for this than any tournament I've ever fished," he said. "I expected to do good and I expected myself to win and when you're not catching them up to those expectations, you start freaking out. I had to reprogram the way I fish the lake and not run off past history.
"I was a little shaky on Day 1, but then I got in a groove. On championship day, I was cool as a cucumber. I've very proud of the way I fished all week."
His original plan was to head back to the big current after he'd done some work in the lower end in the Championship Round, but that trip never happened. There were far more than enough fish chasing bait around the two depressions in his starting spot.
"I think I could've run up the river and won it, but there was no reason to," he said. "The fish were right there. I kept an open mind the whole tournament and didn't get locked in on anything, and I wasn't stubborn. There's a chance I could've run up that river again and maybe lost the tournament."
He never saw another tournament boat throughout the day.
"The place I won the tournament on, I'd caught them there before, but normally it was in a five-fish (format) and I'd catch one or two and leave," he said. "With the sky being cloudy and the bait being in there, it was the winning recipe."
