The Daily Crank

It was getaway day for the FLW Tour pros Feb. 10 following the decision by tournament officials to cancel the season-opening tournament on the Red River, which meant Lucky Craft pro-staffer Brent Ehrler … had no clue what he was going to do.

“I woke up that morning and everything just kind of happened,” he said at the Little Rock, Ark., airport waiting on a flight home to California. “I dropped off my boat here at Scott Suggs’ house, got to the airport and headed home.”

High, muddy and cold water in the Red River due to continual storms moving through the Southwest and Southeast created unsafe conditions. All but one launch ramp in the Shreveport area were closed and the main river was unfishable as well as difficult to navigate. Ehrler said most of the field was piled into backwater areas in which high muddy water obscured stumps and hazards, requiring idle speed.

Once there, he said, many of those backwater sloughs were too muddy to fish. That put much of the field “on top of each other” where there was cleaner water.

“I still got in the mode, practiced hard and knew what I was going to do,” he said. “I wasn’t going to change much other than to go to one or two areas. Whether that would have paid off, I don’t know. But I knew what I was going to do.

“It was like fishing with a 4-wheel drive getting through stuff to get into some areas. It was tough water, tough conditions, guys on top of each other and a grueling day to get one or two bites in practice. You wake up in the morning and go out just hoping to get one or two bites.”

Ehrler said despite practicing three days before the off-day, he believes FLW Tour officials made the right decision based on safety. The tournament will not be rescheduled and the season will have five qualifying events for the Forrest Wood Cup in August.

The FLW Tour will head to Table Rock in Missouri two weeks from now for the March 3-6 tournament on the famed reservoir.

“We’ll have a good tournament there,” Ehrler said. “With Table Rock, it doesn’t matter if the water’s high, cold or muddy. Those fish always bite at Table Rock.”