Bryan Thrift caught 14 fish weighing 79 pounds and 15 ounces during the three-day Walmart FLW tournament held Thursday through Saturday on the Santee Cooper lakes.
For his first-place finish, angler-champion Thrift pocketed more than $93,000, and took home other assorted prizes.
Thrift had started out his season in the first Costa FLW Series event in 102nd place on Lake Okeechobee. He then finished an even more dismal 132nd at the Walmart FLW Tour opener, also on Lake Okeechobee.
This weekend’s win, “righted the ship,” Thrift said.
“After starting the year with two finishes below 100th place, this makes me feel a little better,” he said. “We’re building a new house, and I have not had a paycheck since August, so this is going to relieve a lot of stress for me.”
Thrift caught more than 25 pounds on the first day of the tournament – March 10 – and had near that amount on Friday.
“I love Santee; I’m only about a three-and-a-half hour drive away, and I haven’t fished here but six or seven times, but I really like the lake a lot,” Thrift said. “I’ve made a lot of great friends down here over the years, and it’s just a place that I really love to come to.”
Thrift is a full-time angler with the tour and the Costa series, he said.
“I run a Ranger boat with an Evinrude,” he said. “I used a 6-foot-9 Fitzgerald rod. A lot of people, when they think about the trees out there, they want to use a 7.5-foot rod, but really you can’t make as accurate of a cast with a rod that long when you are trying to skip the bait up under the trees and stuff like that.”
Co-angler champion Todd Walters of Summerville said he fishes the Santee-Cooper lakes on a regular basis. It was his first time fishing in the tournament, however.
“At the first weight-in, I had about 20 pounds and 13 ounces; at the second, I had 13 pounds and 13 ounces,” he said.
His overall weight for 15 fish across the three-day tournament was 55 pounds and 11 ounces. He took home more than $6,000 in prize money and a fully outfitted Ranger Z117 boat.
“Winning today means a lot to me personally,” he said. “It’s not about the prize money or the boat. It just means a lot, because I really wanted to win. It’s my first championship win, and my second tournament.”
Walters said he felt the lake served his efforts well.
“The lake was great,” he said. “It was a little bit high, which is good because it makes it tougher. I like when it’s tougher. Having a local’s knowledge of the lake really helped give me an advantage."
Overall, anglers from as far away as Tennessee and Alabama placed in the Top 10 for the tournament. For co-anglers, fishermen from as far away as Maryland and Florida placed in the Top 10.
Walters was one of four co-anglers to finish in the Top 10 with his win. The others included Johnsonville's Patrick Cook, who placed fourth; Leesville's Jeff Rikard, who placed sixth; and Sumter's Lonnie Drusch, who placed 10th.
As for anglers, only one South Carolina resident placed in the Top 10. Summerville's Todd Smith placed eighth.
Ron Lappin, who is in his 20th year working with the FLW series, said that anglers and co-anglers are paired together randomly the first two days of each tournament in the series. On the third day, the top ranked angler and co-angler are paired together, followed by the second-ranked and so on. He said most of the angler fishermen are not "professionals, necessarily, but a lot of them are."
He said the man difference between the divisions is that anglers pay a higher registration fee.
Overall, Lappin said the tournament comes “every two or three years to the Santee Cooper lakes.”
“With a division that covers an area as big as the southeast, we’ve got a lot of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia fishermen, so we’ve got to come to this area,” he said. “This is the first time that we’ve come this early (in the year), at the first part of the spawn.”
Lappin said the tournament typically comes to South Carolina’s largest freshwater lakes in mid-spring.
“We usually come in April or May, but it worked out well this year, because (the next weekend), the college championships are up in Anderson and the Hartwell event is close,” he said.
This, he noted, gives “the guys who are planning on fishing them as well an opportunity to draw them down here and compete with the local fishermen.”
Lappin said that more than 200 boats set off from John C. Land III Landing during the tournament, making it “the biggest tournament we’ve had here in a number of years.”
“The people here understand what this is all about,” he said. “The facility at John C. Land is one of the best in the country; you can take care of your fish and fishermen and it’s a great launching area. This is just a great place to hold a tournament, and it always draws good crowds like what we saw this weekend.”
Lappin said that Nelson Walker and Jake Buddin – the Clarendon County Chamber of Commerce members who organize such tournaments “understand what it’s all about.”
“They know that we brought in more than $1.5 million into this economy in the last 10 days,” Lappin said. “We gave them an economic survey, which outright states that. They know what this means to the area, and how that works out. They understand us and we understand them.”
Lappin said that October’s devastating flooding likely helped the fishing on the lakes.
“All the fishermen talked about the color of the water,” he said. “If that water had been clear, than these shallow-water fishermen couldn’t have gotten up on the fish and caught them as well as they did. It had a lot to do with them being able to catch those fish in that shallow water.”
Walker said he believes the weather had more to do with the large weights of fish caught.
“I don’t think the flood affected the lake that fast,” he said. “I think it probably contributed more nutrients to the lake that will have a major impact down the road. But the fish these men caught, they were already there.”
“What did it for this tournament was we had the first major warming trend since the winter, and the bigger fish are the first to come up,” Walker continued. “Lake Okeechobee is supposed to be one of the best fishing lakes out there, and they got 48 pounds in their three-day tournament in the series. We beat that to death in the first two days.”
Walker said the next fishing event for lakes Marion and Moultrie include the FLW BFL event on April 16. Fishermen from both North and South Carolina will compete.
That one-day tournament will be followed by the Santee Cooper Open Team Tournament on April 23. That event is sponsored by the Clarendon County Chamber of Commerce as part of the Striped Bass Festival. Walker said registration forms are available at the chamber office on North Brooks Street in Manning from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays.
“I think this tournament showed that we are in for some large weigh-ins in these future tournaments,” said Walker.
