Looking to be the first to ever win the Cup twice, Anthony Gagliardi fell off a few pounds on day two and dropped into third. He’s less than 3 pounds off the lead and, as the hometown hero, he’s plenty close to making a run on the final day.
Gagliardi is fishing from about Dreher Island to the dam and has focused his efforts more on shoals, points and areas than specific targets, sometimes fishing way out near the main channel and sometimes a fair bit back in the larger creeks and bays.
“Today I had a hard time catching them on the stuff that was back in, and I felt I had to be on the main-channel stuff,” says Gagliardi. “But that got hard to do later on with the boat traffic.”
Tossing a soft-plastic jerkbait and a pencil popper, Gagliardi believes the schooling bite suffered due to the change from cloudy to sunny skies. If it doesn’t rebound, he’s got some other cards to play as well.
“I’ve got a series of shallow brush piles that I’ve yet to fish,” says the Prosperity, S.C., pro. “I did that last time [the 2014 Cup on Murray] a couple days, and I caught the three biggest fish I weighed in that tournament doing that. I almost did it today. At 1 o’clock when the boat traffic was bad and the bite was really tough I was just about to make a run up the lake to try to catch a big one. I fished a place on the way and caught a big one, and it threw a little hiccup in my plan, and I didn’t make the run. Tomorrow, if things aren’t going extremely well, I might pull the trigger and see if I can’t hit the jackpot up there.”
Anthony Gagliardi won the Forrest Wood Cup in 2014 on Lake Murray, and he’s in great position after day one to be the first to win two. Weighing 21-1, which was amazingly the biggest bag Gagliardi has weighed all season, he sits in second place just 4 ounces behind Atkins.
Fishing a lot like he did on the final day of his 2014 win, Gagliardi leaned hard on the offshore schooling bite to accumulate his catch. Unlike in 2014, he spent most of the day actually casting, not simply waiting for fish to surface on blueback herring. Throwing just a topwater plug and a soft-plastic jerkbait, the South Carolina pro says he’s only caught about eight keepers on the day, but he caught a lot of quality and one near-6-pounder for a kicker.
“That was probably the biggest fish I’ve ever caught fishing like I do out there,” says Gagliardi. “I’m probably not going to catch one like that tomorrow, but I still have some stuff left. I can get bites, and when I get bites a lot of them have been quality bites. If things work out like I envision I think I can have five good fish, but maybe not with a kicker like that.”
As a veteran of Lake Murray, Gagliardi admits that his weight on day one surprised him, but he’s not entirely shocked to see the bite as good as it is. He says the water temperature has dropped about 10 degrees over the past three weeks, and that slim hint of fall-ish weather has the offshore fish chasing more willingly than they did in 2014.
Photo/Story Joe Cook, wltx COLUMBIA, SC - One of the biggest fishing tournaments in the country will be taking place right here in the Midlands this week. The Fishing League Worldwide Forrest Wood Cup tournament will be held at Lake Murray.
The last time this event was in Columbia was in 2014 and that's when local angler Anthony Gagliardi of Prosperity, SC won the championship. He's back in the tournament this year.
Newberry based company Falcon Boats is one of his sponsors and and he has a good chance to become the first angler to win two Forrest Wood Cup titles. This year's contest will be on his home lake and he'll have to beat out 53 other fishermen to accomplish the feat.
"It'd be awful nice to accomplish something that's not been done but honestly just winning it again in front of a home crowd that's what would be special to me," Gagliardi said. "It's in my backyard and I will have a lot of fan support, a lot of family and friend support but then to be able to be the guy-I was first guy to win two that'd be pretty cool. That'd be a pretty good feather in your hat but that's not what's driving me, that's not my motivation going into this one." Full Story
The Forrest Wood Cup, the world championship of professional bass fishing, will return to Lake Murray Country, Aug. 11-13, to crown bass fishing’s top angler of 2017. Hosted by the Capital City Lake Murray Country Regional Tourism Board, the tournament will feature 53 of the world’s best bass-fishing professionals casting for the sport’s biggest award – $300,000 cash.
The Forrest Wood Cup has been held at Lake Murray, the Jewel of South Carolina, twice, in 2008 and 2014. Michael Bennett of Lincoln, California, won the 2008 Forrest Wood Cup fishing with a frog. Bennett ran all around the lake, targeting shade and a variety of shallow cover, fishing new water each day. The 2014 Forrest Wood Cup went to local favorite Anthony Gagliardi of Prosperity, South Carolina, who fished points and some upriver brush the first couple of days, but relied mostly on offshore schooling bass to earn the win.
“The key factor in this year’s event will be catching a 5-pounder every day,” Gagliardi said. “The lake is fishing really good – similar to 2014 – but there are also some differences. There is a lot more grass and vegetation this year. The fish are a little bigger, and there won’t be co-anglers fishing in this tournament. But the patterns will be similar to 2014, and guys will be doing a lot of the same things to catch fish.” Full Story
