Jeff Gustafson details smallmouth tactics that helped him win the 2023 Bassmaster Classic

When Jeff Gustafson won the Bassmaster Classic on the Tennessee River this past March it was a journey that began 30 years prior to his epic triumph. 

“I fished my first bass tournament when I was 10 years old,” said Gustafson, who grew up on Canada’s north end of Lake of the Woods. “My dad took me. He didn’t bass fish, but he knew I liked it. He just wanted to fish for walleyes. He saw that I was interested in bass fishing, and we started fishing some of the tournaments around here. For the first few years it was just “try and catch a bass or two” so we could weigh in, and after a few years we began to get a little more competitive. So you can see I caught the bug for it pretty early.” 

While in high school and college, Gustafson guided anglers as a summer job. He worked at a number of resorts and fishing camps around Lake of the Woods, and meanwhile he was still fishing local tournaments and having some success. 

“When I finished at the university, I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Gustafson recalls, “but I knew I didn’t want a Monday- through-Friday job. It was then I decided between the guiding and tournament fishing, I would try to figure out how to make a living at it. I did some photography and outdoor writing and got some sponsors and I just kept making it work.” 

Gustafson’s big break came in 2012 when Don Nelson, who owned Kruger Farms, an online retailer (and a former guide client) paid his entry fees to fish the FLW tournament circuit for the first couple years. Without his help, Gustafson might not have pursued a career in professional bass fishing. 

“For a regular guy the expenses are insane, and I didn’t have any experience fishing at that level. I got my butt kicked many times in those early years, but I did good enough to hang in there and make enough money to keep doing it. If you can survive those first few years, it gets easier. Your consistency gets better and you have a few good events and winning “The Classic” is the cherry on top of it all,” he said. 

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Prior to his Classic victory, Gustafson had succeeded in winning a Bassmaster tournament event on the Tennessee River just two years prior. He credits this experience with contributing to his ultimate big win at “The Classic.” 

“One thing I learned from the 2021 tournament was that during that time of year a lot of the smallmouth bass in this river system are in the winter mode,” Gustafson said. “If ‘The Classic’ would have been held a couple weeks later those fish might have been gone. They were actually starting to leave these winter spots as we got into the event.” 

In their winter mode, the smallmouth were tucking tight to the bottom and nestling into the rocks. Gustafson found he could idle over them but not see them on his sonar. He thinks that prevented lot of other guys finding the fish.

It took some searching to locate the rocks where the fish were, and during the pre-tournament scouting Gustafson used an underwater camera to confirm their presence. There’s not a lot of rock there in the vicinity, so even small rock piles held smallies. 

“I had to look closely at these spots so I dropped an Aqua-Vu camera down and you could see these smallmouth hiding in the cracks of the rocks and belly to the bottom. This helped me find more spots, because every time I found some rocks I would drop the camera down to see what was around,” he said. 

Underwater camera usage had been part of Gustafson’s program for many years since first discovering their utility at the Kenora Bass International in the late 1990s. Ted Capra and Jim Lindner won that tournament when Gustafson was 17 years old, and he recalls, those guys were his idols. 

“After their win, they told everyone they won the tournament because they were using the Aqua-Vu underwater camera. They were dropping the camera on the 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 got a camera very early on and never went on the water without it and I’ve used it a lot,” Gustafson recalled. 

During all three days of the recent Classic competition, Gustafson used one of two Z-Man lures. One was a 4-inch smelt-colored Scented Jerk ShadZ and the other was a smaller StreakZ in the same pattern. These plastic trailers were tipped on a Bass Tactics Smeltinator Jighead. 

His technique was a vertical presentation aptly dubbed “moping” because it doesn’t require a lot of action on the lure. 

“Usually, there’s very little actual jigging,” Gustafson said. “But if bass approach yet hesitate, I give the bait a slight little quiver. Or you can pull it up and away – make them chase or play keep-away.”

Gustafson’s Bassmaster Classic win was only the second time in the tournament’s 52-year history that someone not a U.S. citizen won the event. Canada has some incredible bass anglers, and “Gussy” – as he is affectionately known – proved that winning bass fishing techniques are universal and through shear persistence and years of hard work one can achieve the ultimate reward.