BASS REPORT: Ehrler: "I've slept better this week than in a long time."
NEW July 27, 2009 / 7:30 p.m PST

PITTSBURGH, Penn. - What do you do when you’re 2 days away from the biggest bass tournament of your life and it feels like there are no bass within two time zones of the spots you’ve been fishing?

If you’re Brent Ehrler, you sleep like a baby.

Day 3 of practice for the 2009 Forrest Wood Cup on the Three Rivers of Pittsburgh finds the Redlands, CA pro scraping and clawing and scratching his head, trying to find bass – ANY bass – in the Ohio, Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers where the richest professional bass tournament in the world will kick off competition on Thursday.

Ehrler, like most of the 77 pros preparing to compete in the Cup, has found the bite to be difficult bordering on non-existent in three full practice days.

“This is by far the toughest practice I’ve ever had,” Ehrler said Monday night. “I honestly don’t think there are any fish in there. You might fish all day and not catch a fish, and it’s really discouraging to not catch anything. Fishing’s just tough.”

Seems like it'd be hard to get a good night’s sleep in those conditions, knowing that a cool $1 million is on the line. Not for Ehrler.

“Actually, (the mental challenge) is easier than I would’ve expected,” he says. “I've slept better this week than I have in a long time. This is a tournament where there’s a lot on the line if you win, but if something doesn’t materialize, it’s not like I missed out on qualifying for something else. If it doesn’t go well, you lick your wounds, come back next season and start all over again.”

Not that Ehrler plans to hit cruise control on Thursday, when be blasts off from Steelers Quay in his Ranger Z520 and heads out into the bass badlands in search of one to two 12-inch keeper smallies a day. After racking up over $114,000 on the Walmart FLW National Guard Western Division Series and another $81,500 on the FLW Tour in 2009, he’s an honest threat to win the Cup … as are the 76 other pros competing in a tournament that makes the term “parity” seem like a parody.

“Every guy who fishes this is going to say it’s tough,” he says. “THE GUY who wins it is going to say ‘Man, that was tough.’ I haven’t talked to anybody this week who’s into anything solid, so I’m going to go into it thinking that if I can get one to two bites – keeper bites – a day, I’ll be happy. Nobody’s out here saying ‘I’m in to five fish a day!’. It’s all ‘One here, one there’, or ‘I’m not catching anything’.”

Having said that, $1 million is $1 million, and the challenge of breaking the Three Rivers Riddle is the albatross that Ehrler and 76 other pros face tomorrow as they take their last practice swings at the Steel City. Ehrler swears that he’ll keep moving tomorrow and throughout the tournament, even when he stumbles upon a keeper or two in one location.

“I haven’t seen them group up at all, so I’m going to just keep grinding it out all day long,” he says. “The temptation might be to stay in one place a little once you find a fish, but I really think this is going to be a tournament where you catch one fish and grind it out, and maybe catch another fish a few hours later, and grind it out some more. If the tournament started tomorrow, I don’t honestly know where I’d go, and I don’t know what I’d be throwing when I got there. I’d probably go to spots I’ve never been to before in hopes of getting a bite. There’s no reason to go back to areas where you didn’t get a bite, because there’s probably nothing there.”

Bait grinding: I ask Ehrler to describe his baits for the week, and then get a chuckle when I jokingly point out that he might as well be casting onto the face of the moon if there are no fish to react to a finesse plastic or stickbait.

Ehrler plans to cycle through a handful of baits in hopes of finding a subtle pattern somewhere, but a Lucky Craft Slender Pointer 97 MR or Pointer 78 SP will be major parts of his Day 1 arsenal.

“(Kevin) Van Dam won (the 2005 Bassmaster Classic) here on a jerkbait, so that’s where I’m going to start,” Ehrler says. “So far, One day I’m throwing a lot of one bait, the next day it’s a lot of a different bait. I guess a guy would be more effective if he picked a bait he has a lot of confidence in and threw it all day long. I think the bottom line is that it has to be an area thing: you have to be in the right place, no matter (what you’re fishing).”

So Ehrler will sleep well the next two days, and wake up Thursday with a 1-in-77 chance of becoming a millionaire.

“Tournament day is a new day,” he says. “I’ll just do my best and see what happens.”

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