2010 FORREST WOOD CUP: Hobbs advances to final day of 2010 FWC
POSTED Aug. 7, 2010 / 11:40 p.m.

DULUTH, Georgia - What's it like to be Ron Hobbs, Jr. right now? For starters, he's learning how to sign autographs.

Just a few minutes after creeping into the Top 6 and earning the right to fish for $500,000 on the final day of the 2010 Forrest Wood Cup, Hobbs is approached by a 5-year-old boy wearing a white tournament jersey and packing a pen.

"Mister, are you fishing tomorrow?" the boy asks.

"Yes, I am," Hobbs replies.

"Then, can you sign my shirt?" the boy says, handing Hobbs his pen.

Hobbs obliges, smiling as he signs the front of the little boy's shirt. But, almost as quickly as he says "thank you", the little boy hits Hobbs with this dose of reality: "Mister, you smell like fish."

Hobbs doesn’t miss a beat.

"You're right, I do,” he says. “That's because I caught a bunch of them this week."

Yes, he did. Exactly 15 of them weighing 35 pounds, 3 ounces, enough to push him into fifth place, 2 ounces ahead of Troy Morrow and a scant 9 ounces ahead of the last man to miss the cut, local Lake Lanier legend Tom Mann, Jr.

That nine ounces, if things play out perfectly on Sunday, could translate into a cool half-million in Hobbs' bank account, and a nifty new piece of silver hardware in the Hobbs household: the Forrest Wood Cup. 

Final pre-flight checks
For now, Hobbs’ reward for catching those 15 fish is to run the gauntlet of rehearsals and logistics as FLW personnel prepare the top 6 for what will happen on Sunday. First, it’s a walk-through of the weigh-in, where Hobbs, Ehrler, Meyer, Nixon, Hawk and Morrow are warned about "CO2 blasts", "pyro", lasers, and told repeatedly how to walk onstage when they’re introduced to a packed Gwinnett Center crowd. 

FLW Outdoors president Charlie Evans, an FLW stage director, another FLW production manager and FLW's special effects (pyro!) guy lay out a detailed series of instructions on how the weigh-in will go, choreographing every step the top 6 will take, from the second they're introduced (smoke, CO2 blasts, lasers, pyro!) to the moment the Forrest Wood Cup champion is crowned (BIG pyro, lasers, confetti, more pyro, a little more pyro, speeches, pyro, pyro, pyro!).

All while Forrest L. Wood himself, the creator of Ranger boats and godfather of tournament bass fishing, looks on. 

For a humble milkman from Orting, Hobbs looks pretty damn comfortable with it all. No small feat when Forrest L. Wood himself – the iconic creator of Ranger boatsand godfather of tournament bass fishing – looks on, and the guy sitting directly across from Hobbs onstage is none other than Larry "The General" Nixon, one of the most successful, respected anglers of all time, and a boyhood hero of Hobbs’. 

“I called him ‘Mr. Nixon’ today, and I think he took offense,” Hobbs jokes. “It’s weird, man. When I was a kid, I read every article I could about the guy. I tried to watch Larry Nixon everytime he was ever on TV, and I tried to read every Field & Stream magazine cover to cover to try to learn about this stuff.”

“I didn’t think I had it ...”
Hobbs' participation in the final day was in serious danger of evaporating in the final few minutes of Saturday’s weigh-in. His biggest fish of the day - a spotted bass that stretched 24 inches - died in his live well, costing Hobbs 8 precious ounces in penalty weight. To make matters worse, Hobbs was accosted off his best big-fish spot by a local who threatened to “shoot holes in that boat”.

A quick look at his five-fish limit as he loaded his weigh-in back in the Gwinnett Center parking lot seemed to show about 10 pounds, a number that didn’t look particularly safe when Hobbs arrived at the backstage holding tanks and settled into his assigned position next to Ehrler, who’s 14-4 bag – the biggest of the tournament so far – bulged with three of the biggest spotted bass weighed in all week.

To add to the anxiety, Morrow and Mann, who entered the day 1-13 and 2-13 behind Hobbs, both had five-fish limits that looked to run at least 12 pounds apiece.

At first glance, Hobbs hopes looked likethey were fading fast, and all he could do was stand nervously at the tanks for an hour, waiting his turn to weigh in, doing mental aerobics and kicking himself for not catching one slightly bigger fish.

“It was nerve-wracking, because I didn’t think I had it,” Hobbs says. “Standing back there, everybody is trying to calculate what it’ll take, and I didn’t think I was going to make it. I was super disappointed.”

It got worse when Mann weighed in.

With 12-7 on the day and a three-day total of 34-10, the Buford, Georgia crowd favorite seemingly had the final spot wrapped up by a scant few ounces. Hobbs’ estimation of 10 pounds would put him at 34-3, 7 ounces out of the cut.

Consequently, when Evans hit the “lock” button on the onstage scale for Hobbs’ five fish and it read “11.8” – even with the 8-ounce penalty pushing his three-day total to 35-3 and into the lead – Hobbs nearly doubled over backwards in relief and surprise.

“I think I might’ve done a little dance onstage when I saw 11 ½,” Hobbs says. “I was super jacked. When Mann weighed 34, I thought, ‘I’m out, that broke my back.’ At that point before I weighed, I didn’t think enough of the guys ahead of me would stumble. I figured I’d make it if I had 35, so when I saw I had 35, I thought I had a pretty good chance.”

Hobbs’ lead disappeared immediately when Ehrler dropped his 14-plus-pound bag on the scale, and Meyer, Nixon and Hawk slipped past him with 11-5, 11-5 and 11-2, respectively. It wasn't until Jason Christie weighed in 8-0 and Gainseville local Jason Meninger registered 7-5 that Hobbs knew for sure he'd made the Final 6.

It all comes down to this ...
My phone rings at 10:03 p.m. Atlanta time. It’s Hobbs. He’s just returning from the FLW boat yard, where he’s had to switch all of his gear from his Triton to a sponsor-wrapped Ranger – the Folgers boat, which seems like comical irony for a guy from the “Coffee Capitol of the World” to be fishing in a coffee boat.

In the past three hours, he’s “made the rounds”- calling his parents back home in Seattle, chatting with Nixon’s Marine owner Jeff Priester - and sat through exhaustive instructions on his FLW cameraman, instructions on how to get in and out of the Blackhawk helicopter (“They say to take your hat and glasses off because the wind will whip ‘em right off your head,” he says), more instructions on the weigh-in.

He’s been told precisely how to do everything on Sunday except how to catch five big fish out of Lake Lanier.

That’s all still up in the air in Hobbs’ mind.

“I don’t know for sure what I’m going to do,” Hobbs admits. “Just like the past three days, when I’m running down the lake in the morning, I’ll figure out what feels right, and go with it.”

Two things are certain, though: 1). He’ll return to his two primary spots – the Magic Tree and one particular dock in a tributary creek of the Chestatee River; 2). He’ll likely explore some new water, because he feels like he needs to find some new fish.

“One of my best spots I got the 4 ½-pounder yesterday and a 3-pound largemouth the day before, but it’s a crappy little run-down dock where the guy was standing there, launching his bait clear across the canal,” Hobbs says. “I asked him if he minded if I fished by him, and he said ‘Hell yeah, I mind’ and started cussing me. I asked him ‘Can you give me a little break here, I’m fishing for a half-million dollars?’, and he said ‘I don’t care, and I’m going to go get my gun and put holes in that boat.’

But unlike the first three days, where Hobbs was under some pressure to conserve those locations so they’d last throughout the tournament, the final day is all about swinging for the fences. Hobbs absolutely needs to catch a five-fish limit, but if he’s going to creep past Hawk, Nixon, Meyer and Ehrler, he’ll need to upgrade the quality of his fish and possibly push into the 13- to 14-pound range.

“I think I need to go find new fish, I really do, but I think I’m going to go hit the sweet spots for largemouth, hit the sweet spots for spotted bass, and get out of there,” Hobbs says. “This lake is a mess on the weekend – there’s more boat traffic on it than any lake I’ve ever seen, especially down in the main lake. Plus, it’s the weekend, so people are out playing on their docks.”

Hobbs will stick with the shallow drop-shot pattern, though, fishing a Zoom Shaky Worm, hoping for a couple of kicker largemouth.

“Largemouth are a diamond in the rough here,” he says. “They’re here, but it’s almost impossible to find a group of them. I’d like to catch five of them if I could.”

And then there's the helicopter ride.

"You think they'll let me do like in the Viet Nam movies, where the guys are sitting on the edge with their legs hanging out the side?" Hobbs says.
-JS

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8CLICK ON THE NWWC BASS REPORT regularly for exclusive on-site updates as NWWC host Joel Shangle heads to Atlanta to cover the "world championship of bass fishing".

-JS

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