Career Highlights

Tommy's Quick Tip: If the sun shines for three or more straight days during the winter and the water is up in some brush or other cover, it's time to pull out your flipping stick and head for the shallows. The bass will be up in the bushes warming themselves in the sun, and you can really catch some big strings. I like to fish a jig on my 7-6 Quantum PT flipping rod and a Quantum Tour Edition PT baitcaster reel with the 7.0:1 Burner gear ratio.

A Classic Day with Tommy Biffle
Keith Blackstone's Day with TB at the 2006 Bassmaster Classic - From BassZone.Com

During media day I had the opportunity to talk to Tommy about what we might be doing on Friday. Biffle has always been known as one to take the path least traveled, I wasn’t surprised at all when he told me we would be taking a long run. Although we are in sunny Florida, the mornings have been cool couple the temperature with a seventy mile an hour wind, I was glad I brought my Gore-Tex.

Trying to get a mental picture of how the day would unfold we talked about the cover and watercolor in his areas. Tommy said the water looked like black coffee, since both of us are from Oklahoma, I asked him to compare the watercolor to a lake around home. "There wasn’t any water in Oklahoma that looks like the water here at Toho,” he explained.

Still, never actually seeing the water at Toho, I couldn’t picture black coffee colored water.

Power Play
When ESPN/BASS notified The BASS ZONE a few weeks before the Classic that I would be spending day one of the Classic with Tommy, flipping automatically entered my mind.

Perfect, the stage was set, Tommy Biffle in Florida in February. It was time for school; I was going to be privy to an eight-hour clinic on what a flipping stick was intended for.

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