The next stop was the Mississippi River out of Fort Madison. I'm going to tell you, talk about a tough tournament, you know this was a really tough one. You had high, muddy water, you had fish that were spread out, and you were coming off of a major flood so this was a real tough event.

I decided to fish backwaters in this event. You have main river and backwater and I decided to fish backwater, I locked one time up and I found the backwater that held a concentration of fish. I knew it was going to be tough. I'll be honest with you, the first day I didn't adjust, I didn't figure it out, but I stuck with it and the second and third day I caught limits both days. And I did that by slowing down and finesse fishing a jig.

You know when you talk about jig fishing, normally you think about a big jig, ripping it up off the bottom. But you could get a jig and you could finesse fish it and fish it slow and deliberately and that's what I did. And, of course, I used the Berkeley Ike's finesse fishing jig but I made a modification to the jig that really helped me catch these finicky fish. So I took the normal jig and I used the small one, I used a quarter ounce jig black and blue and we've got a two-part skirt on this jig and what I did in this tournament was I took the regular silicone skirt completely off. Get rid of that silicone skirt! And you're left with a hand tied living rubber section and it's not a lot it's just a small little puff of living rubber.

Then to that I added a Berkeley Chigger Craw. This is probably one of the best jig trailers out there. I just threaded that thing one there and if you look at it, it takes a normal jig and it makes it into a smaller, more compact package.

I took that little tiny jig, I fished it slow around any kind of wood or grass cover that I could find. I was able to get 5 bites a day, 5 keeper bites a day the last two days and move up in points. When things are tough, get a little jig, take that skirt off make it finesse and you'll catch more fish!