DANDRIDGE, Tenn. — Britt Myers swears that a smack across the face kicked-started him into taking the lead in the Douglas Lake Challenge.

As Myers told it, Friday morning fishing in the Bassmaster Elite Series event was slow. Then he finally got a hit. It felt like a big largemouth of 5 pounds.

“I’m fighting and fighting it, and it gets right near the boat and it’s got one itty-bitty hook right in the bottom of the lip,” he said. “It was a dumb decision, but I decided to flip it (jerk it into the boat with the rod) and it came off.

“I turned to my (Marshall) and said, ‘Dude, just smack me.’ So he smacked me. Hey, I told him to — and I deserved it.”

Did the shock work?

“I didn’t do anything stupid the rest of the day,” Myers grinned.

Indeed he did not. With 24 pounds, 1 ounce, to show by the end of the day, Myers of Lake Wylie, S.C., moved from third place into the lead with 45-2 over two days. He was 3-14 ahead of first-day leader Aaron Martens of Leeds, Ala., who dropped to second place with 41-4.

Third was Jeremy Starks of Scott Depot, W.Va., who turned in 23-1, the day’s second-largest bag. He improved from 12th place, a spot he shared Thursday with Alabama’s Randy Howell. Dean Rojas of Lake Havasu City, Ariz., was fourth with 38-7, and Andy Montgomery of Blacksburg, S.C., was fifth with 33-15.

Myers, hot off a second-place finish April 22 in the Elite’s Bull Shoals Lake event, said quality, not numbers, was the order of the day. He weighed only one of his big bass separately, and it was a 5-8.

“It was one of those days when — thank God — when I got a bite, it was a good one,” he said, describing his catches as post-spawners on the feed.

Douglas Lake’s huge schools of largemouth bass were heavily hit by the 99-angler Elite field, Myers said, but he wasn’t targeting the masses of bass. He declined to specify how he was catching his fish.

“Let me put it this way: I think I’m fishing a little bit different depth, and that was a key (at Bull Shoals),” he said.

Source: Deb Johnson, BASS Communications