When Jeff Gustafson won the Bassmaster Classic on the Tennessee River in March of this year – a journey that began 30 years before his great triumph.
“I fished my first bass tournament when I was 10,” said Gustafson, who grew up on the north end of Lake of the Woods in Canada. “My dad would take me. He wasn’t into bass fishing, but he knew I liked it. He just wanted to fish for walleye. He saw that I was interested in bass fishing, and we started fishing some tournaments around here. The first few years it was just ‘try to catch a bass or two’ so we could weigh in, and after a few years we started getting a little more competitive. So, you see, I got hooked pretty early.”
Throughout high school and college, Gustafson was a fishing guide as a summer job. He worked at several fishing centers and camps around Lake of the Woods, and in between, he continued to compete in local fishing tournaments and had some success.
“When I got out of college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Gustafson recalls, “but I knew I didn’t want to work Monday through Friday. That’s when I decided that between guiding and tournament fishing, I was going to try to find a way to make a living. I did some photography and outdoor writing, found some sponsors, and just kept going.”
Gustafson’s huge break came in 2012, when Don Nelson, owner of online retailer Kruger Farms (and a former guide client), paid his entry fee to fish the FLW tournament circuit for the first few years. Without his support, Gustafson might not have pursued a career in professional bass fishing.
“For a regular guy, the costs are crazy and I had no experience fishing at that level. I got my ass kicked a lot in those early years but I did well enough to support myself and make enough money to keep doing it. If you can get through those first few years it gets easier. Your consistency improves, you have a few good events and winning The Classic is the icing on the cake,” he said.
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Before winning the Classic, Gustafson had won the Bassmaster tournament on the Tennessee River just two years earlier. He credits that experience with ultimately winning the huge time at “The Classic.”
“One thing I learned from the 2021 tournament was that at this time of year, a lot of the smallmouth bass in this river system are in winter mode,” Gustafson said. “If The Classic had been a few weeks later, those fish might have been gone. In fact, they started leaving those winter spots when we started the event.”
In winter mode, smallmouth bass were tight on the bottom and nesting in the rocks. Gustafson found he could swim over them but not see them on his sonar. He believes that prevented a lot of other guys from finding the fish.
It took some time to find the rocks that held the fish, and during a pre-tournament scouting, Gustafson used an underwater camera to confirm their presence. There aren’t many rocks in the area, so even miniature piles of rocks held miniature fish.
“I had to look at those spots really closely, so I lowered the Aqua-Vu camera and you could see those smallmouth bass hiding in the cracks in the rocks and belly to the bottom. That helped me find more spots because every time I found some rocks I lowered the camera to see what was around there,” he said.
Underwater camera utilize has been a part of Gustafson’s routine for years, ever since he discovered their utility at the Kenora Bass International in the slow 1990s. Ted Capra and Jim Lindner won that tournament when Gustafson was 17, and he says those guys were his idols.
“After they won, they told everyone they won the tournament because they were using an Aqua-Vu underwater camera. They were dropping the camera on deep points around Lake of the Woods and finding these big schools of smallmouth bass. I immediately thought, ‘I need one of those.’ So I bought a camera really early on and I never went on the water without it, and I used it a lot,” Gustafson recalled.
During all three days of the recent Classic, Gustafson used one of two Z-Man lures. One was a 4-inch Scented Jerk ShadZ in smelt color, the other a smaller StreakZ in the same pattern. The plastic trailers were rigged on a Bass Tactics Smeltinator jighead.
His technique was a vertical presentation, aptly named “moping” because it didn’t require much engagement of the bait.
“There’s usually very little real jigging,” Gustafson said. “But if the bass are still hesitant, I’ll shake the bait a little bit. Or you can pick it up and move it away — make them chase or stay away.”
Gustafson’s victory in the Bassmaster Classic was only the second time in the tournament’s 52-year history that a non-U.S. citizen has won. Canada has some incredible bass anglers, and “Gussy,” as he is affectionately known, proved that winning bass fishing techniques are universal, and that with persistence and years of difficult work, the ultimate prize can be achieved.
