Hutsons win Angler’s Choice Classic on Chickamauga

DAYTON, Tennessee — Poplar Bluff anglers Bruce Hutson and his son, Adam Hutson, faced an uphill battle when they competed Oct. 21-22 in the Angler’s Choice Tournament Trail Classic, but their persistence, and maybe some divine intervention from a lost brother and son, paid off with a big win.

The pair won a new 19-foot Bass Cat Pantera II bass boat with a 200 horsepower, four-stroke Mercury motor, valued at around $50,000, along with nearly $2,000 in cash for their efforts.

More than 230 teams qualified for the national tournament, which was held on East Tennessee’s Lake Chickamauga, 45 miles east of Chattanooga.

“It was a big, big, big tournament. You’ve got to get there by your points,” Bruce Hutson said.

The pair earned their way in through finishes in the Wappapello Lake tournament division over the season.

The Hutsons had qualified for the Classic “10 or 12 times” in the past, Bruce Hutson said, but had never fished Lake Chickamauga, which they described as shallow and grassy.

Conditions were far from ideal when the pair arrived for the tournament, and that made fishing difficult.

“It was cold when we got there, which created such a terrible bite,” Bruce Hutson recalled.

“The first few days we were there, it was pretty chilly in the mornings,” added Adam Hutson.

The duo pre-fished for two days prior to the start of the tournament, trying to figure out the bite and where fish could be found. That, however, turned out to be a tough proposition.

“Chickamauga is like Guntersville (Alabama) in several ways as far as I’m concerned,” said Bruce Hutson. “It’s just packed with big fish, but they weren’t very happy.”

The bite was just “incredibly tough,” said Bruce Hutson. “We only caught two fish pre-fishing the first two days.”

However, the pair did locate two spots with good numbers of bass and formulated a plan to focus on those during the tournament.

“We finally found the fish we ended up catching for the tournament, and honestly, we got lucky,” said Bruce Hutson.

When tournament day one arrived, Adam Hutson said, the pair “had one spot that was a grass mat. It was about a 100-yard stretch with a ditch through it, and literally every bite came out of a spot the size of two boats. We just circled it and circled it and hit it from different angles.

“Our other spot had some schooling fish outside the grass down the lake, but they were real finicky. We fished there maybe an hour or two the first day and went back to our main spot,” Adam Hutson said.

After the first day, the Hutsons had a total weight of 14.69 pounds, putting them in contention with one day to go.

“We were sitting in eighth place after day one, 4 pounds behind the leader,” Bruce Hutson said.

On the second day of the event, the pair hedged all their bets on the short section of grass they fished the day before, and they stayed in that one spot the entire day, tossing frog imitations across the top of the thick vegetation.

“We just kept pounding and pounding them to make them bite … to try to make them mad,” Bruce Hutson said.

As time was running out before the duo had to make a flying run to the weigh-in location, they had four bass in the livewell, one short of the five it would take to place well.

“Our weigh-in was at 4:30, and I told dad we had to leave there at 4. Seven minutes before we needed to go, we still only had four fish,” Adam Hutson said.

That’s when Adam called on his lifelong fishing buddy and brother, Ryan Hutson, for some divine intervention.

Ryan passed away in February 2019, but Adam found comfort in talking to him when the need arose.

“I had been talking to my brother and saying ‘hey, we really need a fish.’ It wasn’t five minutes, and we caught our fifth fish,” he said.

“We threw it in the livewell and had to leave to make it back. We made it to weigh-in with just minutes to spare, so I thought that was pretty cool,” Adam Hutson said.

Winning the tournament, both said, never really crossed their minds.

“I never dreamed we’d win the tournament,” Bruce Hutson said. “I thought we were going to place well. I thought we’d place around eighth, maybe seventh or sixth.”

“I didn’t think there was any chance at all we would win. I figured we’d cash a decent check, but I didn’t think there would be any way we’d win,” added Adam Hutson.

But, they did.

“Guys were coming up to us saying ‘you’ve got this thing won,’” recalled Adam Hutson.

“I was still sitting in the boat, and all of the sudden, those guys came up to me and said ‘you need to get up to the weigh-in,’” Bruce Hutson recalled.

There, the pair had to take a lie detector test, a standard procedure in bass tournaments.

“We found out we had over 17 pounds the second day,” Bruce Hutson said.

That catch, combined with their fish from day one, resulted in a total weight of 31.86 pounds for the tournament and cemented the Hutsons win by nearly 2 pounds.

“It was a phenomenal win,” said Bruce Hutson.

Winning the new boat created its own problem, but one they were happy to figure out.

“We never really thought we’d have a problem like this, but how are we going to get this thing home,” Adam Hutson said he remembered thinking.

Fortunately, a friend from Jackson made the trip the next day and towed the boat home for him.

While the new boat is nice, Adam Hutson said, he and his dad will be selling it because neither needs it.

“I kept Ryan’s boat when he passed away, and there’s just no way I’d get rid of it. I’ll have that boat forever,” Adam Hutson said.