From Mexico to Minnesota: Fishing Adventures with Bass Talk Live's Matt Pangrac | The Omnia Report

Hey guys, Chase here with Omni-Efficient and we're coming back with another Omn ia report. This time we've got a special guest right in house in our studio today. We'll be joined with Mr. Matt Pangrak from Bass Talk Live. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today, Matt. Yeah, anytime you get a chance to step by the Omn ia headquarters, I always like to. It's cool to come in the front door and you kind of have that little storefront deal there. But then you get back into the warehouse. You're like, " Man, anytime I order anything, this is right where it gets picked from. Big giant warehouse where everything that you can get at Omnia is back there." I guess they're in buckets. Bucket shells, little coordinated things. But no, I love this part of the country. Bins, bins, that's the key word. I love this part of the country. It was up here for one of my buddy, Adam Bartizak, and you guys might know him from the crop. He chronicles had his bachelor party . Then on the way back, stopped a fish leech for a day to pre-practice for the upcoming Bass Master Open. And then this was right along the way. So just to give you guys an idea of how much this guy gets around. A couple of weeks ago, he was all the way down in Mexico. Dragged his boat across the border, fished the Pan American. What was it? The outdoors? Sport fishing championships. It's like one of those long acronym names. It's called the Pay and Am Games. Representing Team USA. And now he's all the way up. Barely throw a rock at the Canadian border. And I fit a frog on an Arkansas in there too. You have a frog hunting? I have. Dude, it used to be on your bucket list. With a gig and everything? Not like mainly with the hands. Like we did it for the Bass Fishing Hall of Fame with Steve Bowman, him and his college buddy back in the day learned how to do it. So you get on the front of a flat bottom. Like Titanic style, except laying down and then idle right in on him with a bright spotlight. Just grab him. We got 29 of them. Are you scared of snakes or anything like that? I was more so more. The Gators had me a little bit nervous. We didn't see a single snake, but he said that there were no snakes because the Gators were so aggressive that they ate all the snakes. You'd like pan out as like South West Arkansas. You'd like all the eyes of the Gators. It was really cool. That sounds like an experience. Well, thank you again for taking the time to swing by the shop. We really appreciate that. So why we dragged you in here today? We wanted to kind of talk about a little bit about the area where you're from Oklahoma, Tulsa in particular and just kind of get a feeler for what's going on down there. We got a Bassmaster Elite coming up down there pretty soon, I think. Yeah, Blake, 10 Kiloers. That's this week, isn't it? Yeah . Yeah, it's coming up for sure. It'll be very interesting. Got some high muddy water there just like you do across a lot of the state. Yeah, but that's kind of I mean, that's large mouth country down there. Isn't it? It is 10 Kiloers. One of the few that has a really good population of all three species. You can catch a few small mouth out of. You follow a Texoma has a good population of small mouth, but for the most part, you think Oklahoma, you think large mouth? Large mouth. So I'm just going to go ahead and filter the large mouth here real quick so we can get on to the species we're after here. But in general, you were talking about high water, muddy water right now down there. So shallow baits, flipping baits, stuff like that, chatter baits. We got the deboms, maybe some shallow crank and mixed in with that. Yeah, it's Oklahoma's had one of the wettest springs in history. It's been a long time since we've had water this high kind of flood conditions through all of it. I think last time I checked grand was at 751 and kind of the old standard there is anytime it's at Jumbo jet, which is 747 or higher. That's like get up there and start flipping. And then when they start pulling water from the elk and the neo show down through the dam on the bottom, it really kind of sections the lake off in mud based on how much they pull you know, the more they pull the faster that muddy water comes down. So you see there on the omnipro app that grant is pretty dirty right now. It sure does. When you get up towards the top of the yeah, that's that's definitely where the where the two rivers come in. But this is really good, really good chatter bait water on rock, not a lot of grass in Oklahoma, actually like no grass in grand at all. But you can tell based on that muddy water and a black and blue chatter bait, if you're going to be covering water and fishing for shed, shad kind of imitators those fish that are on shed like that. But the other thing that's really good right now also is flipping willow trees and flipping bushes that are in the water. You can kind of use the bottom hardness feature and look around and find out. So there's tons and tons of willow trees and tons of bushes and grand right here. You can see at the mouth of Horse Creek and that island has literally thousands of willow trees and bushes all around. There's been a lot of fish caught off that island over the years, but there's little portions of it, little sections of it back in the old day. I mean, even before my time, the guys I've been on the boat and they've told me about it, you know, to find the right willows, the right bushes, you stick your rod tip in the water and move it around and you'd want to feel gravel, you'd want to feel hard bottom. I've just used my power poles where you drop the poles and if you're here and crunch in or stuff like that, you know, it's a hard bottom. But you can also tell that kind of hard bottom usually extends up on the bank there. So you can look at the bottom hardness to find the little sections and you can look at the aerial map to find that and that kind of at least gives you a starting point, clues you in on where you want to flip those bushes, flip those willow trees. Some chasing Christie's made really kind of world famous on Grand Lake. Guys have been doing it for decades and decades, but a creature bait. I like a lot of the guys, a lot of the local guys will throw a and I'm not like a grand like expert by any means, but occasionally, but just a green pumpkin brush hog, full size brush hog. There's a lot of crap and you know, if you look at a willow tree up on the bank or a bush up on the bank, like there's a lot of limbs, a lot of stuff going on there. So that kind of six inch profile gives the fish something to find. Dip the tail of chartreuse to mitigate, imitate a green sunfish or warm out the hybrid sunfish, something like that. Half ounce flipping weights, you can kind of get it back through down through those little bit of limbs and then just 25 pound test fluorocarbon string and crack them as hard as you can. It's one of the one of the most fun bites that you can and you know, the Keystone Fort Gibson grand, you fall a year to see some flipping going on on 10 killer in the Elite series tournament. There's a lot of lakes in Oklahoma that are really fun when the water gets up. If you know, if you know kind of how to break it down and find it, it's a lot like the grass fishing up here in Minnesota. Like if you have no idea what you're doing and you get on a lake and start fishing, it can be very intimidating, but you can take some of these tools, some of these clues and break it down. It makes it a lot more manageable and gives you a starting point. And then, you know, if you want to get offshore, you can always structure scope, which is which grand and those lakes are famous for half ounce football jig is always really good. There I see that on the recommended baits from the on the Omnia Pro app too. But yeah, like right there, that's a jewel baits, which is an Ozark staple. The three quarter ounce with just a rage car, some sort of craw trailer on the back doesn't matter. Clean dirty water, you can always track better on brush piles and catch a fish or two. No, it sounds very similar to grass fishing up here. You're always trying to find that the difference in the spot on the spot. The spot on the spot exactly. Exactly. Yeah, so football jigs, we got some punching baits, some flipping baits. You had mentioned scoping. I'm kind of surprised to not see my de-sc oping baits on me right now. Yeah, I mean, right now that so that part of the country, those lakes, there's definitely scope and it goes on a lot of that scope and is more fall wintertime stuff. It's we have like what I would call dirty lakes to where we have we have big gizzard shed, carp drum, buffalo, a heck of a lot of of the freshwater drum on there that kind of react like bass. Three or four different types of gar, all sorts. So you've got a big crappie, big crappie will be identified as bass all the time. So it's not like, oh, you're just going out and if you just hey, there's a fish, it's a bass, you can go out on grain, you can go out on you fall, you can go out on on four gifts and in these lakes and you can cast it stuff all day, every day for as long as you want. And the majority of them are going to be bass 10 killers, little different 10 killers, you know, typically usually a lot cleaner, you have the small mouth, you have the spots. That's a that's a really good kind of suspended fish scoping lake. But the others, the the rough fish or the the channel cat, I didn't even mention that. Oh my gosh, the blue cat and the channel cat are the worse like we didn't even know that blue cat were that aggressive, but you can go out and catch 20 30 a day now and they'll be like suspended under bait balls and come up and eat through it. So it's really hard to just go out and scope on some of these lakes, particularly early summer, these fish are getting offshore. There's a lot of a lot of I don 't want to use word trash, but there's a lot of dirty, lot of other fish that are non bass that kind of protect the bass from getting scoped. And that's not so much the case on 10 killer then. So you might see a little more scoping when it comes to the leads getting down there. Yeah. So they're going to be sc oping piles. It'll be very interesting to see how the high water and muddy water on 10 killer play. I would expect to see a lot of spinner baits, a lot of flipping and then some guys that are still offshore, but that's typically a clear bay fish driven lake. But with this water up with the with so much flow and it was so much color in the water, that could definitely change. You could see guys up, you could see guys up flipping telephone poles and picnic tables and catching them. And I say that like in all seriousness, like what they like, you know, the natural lakes probably don't fluctuate much up here. We don't we don't we get very little fluctuates. But based on kind of how the chain is there's some lakes that they can let water in to keep other areas from getting flooded and stuff. But like, I mean, you legit like think if you think of like a picnic table on a park bench, what does that have it typically has grass around it? And then it's got a picnic table. You've got the four legs, it's got the shade on top of it. And then it's on a cement block. So it's it's like a custom made brush by brush pile with a hard spot for fish on that. So we always joke about, you know, picnic tables and grocery carts. But I mean, you could see someone catch one off a picnic table. That's awesome. That's I didn't even think about that, but that does make the perfect idea. Oh, it's it's idea. Yeah. Yeah . That's awesome. Well, I'm going to switch gears a little bit here. You mentioned you were up north Minnesota for bachelor party. Yeah, it was a fishing fishing bachelor party like legit. We caught crawfish, went golfing and then bass fisher in the day and walleye fish at night. It was like just like two and a half days of outdoor fun. That's on the northern Minnesota. Such a unique and cool place. Yeah, there's nowhere else like it on it. The only comparison to me would be kind of like a little bit of that Western New York around the Thousand Islands area like that where you get kind of that that crisp in the air. But you also have there's way more way more fisheries in northern Minnesota. Like they should have a nickname for the state like 10,000 lakes or so there's at least 10,000 here. Wouldn't that be a great name? It'd be a good nickname. You should go with it. So put it on our license. But yeah, it's it's every five minutes you go past somewhere where you want to drop your boat in and go fish. Like I'm not exaggerating. I'm like, oh, that looks good. That one looks good. That one looks good. Then you pass a lake and be like, oh, I've heard about that lake and then three more lakes you've never heard of. And it's definitely a special part of the country. Well, we got a new feature on our sites and our app that kind of helps us pick which of these lakes we're actually going to put our boat in because again, you can drive down a road and you got many different lakes. And so how do you decide which one? So we actually included all of the DNR survey results. Our DNR goes out, surveys the lakes and then records the data from their survey results and makes that information public. So we were able to get this information uploaded into our server or platform. So yeah, we've got these purple pins. We've got the red pins. We've got blue pins. These purple pins are going to indicate lakes that have lunker potential. So again, our Minnesota DNR went out and surveyed all of these lakes, collected the data and then made this data public so we could get it. And we'll take a look at this one. Right now it'll pull up large mouth bass right away because that's the most popular fish. That's what we get the most reports on. That's going to be your first. But if you click into see all species, this will give you all the D NR DNR indications. Okay, so they're saying like, Pike, Pike fishing has some potential there. So this lake is a Pike Lake. Okay. They have one good potential for Pike. Oh, I think I saw yellow perch as well. Yeah, we got yellow perch in that one. And then we can actually even filter this. So if you're up there, I don't really care about Pike. They're T. You know, I catch a big smally. I want to go after smallies. Oh, there's one up there. So there's one up there. Basswood Lake. That's my that's my place. That's your place. Yeah, that's where I'm headed. So what this is what this is telling you is that the DNR surveyed a small mouth bass that was over 20 inches. Okay. And we do have indications for the other fish. I think Pike and muskies are 36 inches and over walleye or 28 inches. Yeah. So when you dump your boat there , you know, you're not on a stunted lake that has a bunch of 13 inches in it. You're wondering why you don't catch them. You're at least going to a place that you know, you have the potential to catch a big one. Exactly. Okay. I like that. So when you're in an area like this, where there's lakes galore, this home is kind of pinpoint which lakes you want to look at. Very cool feature. Yeah. But another fun thing that happened and why I really kind of wanted to get into this area. There's a Minnesota there's a tournament series here in Minnesota called the classic bass champions tour. And you may have heard they just had a tournament up here on Lake Vermil ion, which is one of the premier lakes in Minnesota. And it's a catch way release format tournament where every fish counts every fish over one pound counts to the anglers total weight for that day. And the weights on this were just astounding. I think you might have even heard some of the room. Yeah. I think the guy who won average to two and a quarter pounder every three and a half minutes for eight hours for eight hours. Yeah, it was wild. It was like 280 pounds of fish. Like I was just a Sam Sobey fish that tournament. And he said after like the first period or saw me said he had, you know, he had been catching him. And Marshall was like, you're in 43rd place. And he's like, he's like, what? He was like 100 pounds behind. I know. And it just, it sounded like it was kind of like the perfect storm when these anglers got up there. They all said there was kind of a pre-spawn conditions. There were some fish that had moved in, some fish that were spawning, but not at all of them yet. And they had a couple of warm days during practice. And they said, turn them a day. All of a sudden, it seemed like every fish in the lake went to the bank. Yeah, that's cool. That's that's the temperature map there is really cool. You can see like specific spawning areas where it is. If you zoom back out, though, something that's cool , like, you know, on those little ponds and things like look how much warmer the ponds are and the backwaters are. Yeah. On that, like it just identifies high percentage spawning areas, just, you know, especially early in the year based on where those fish are based on where they'll be done if you 're trying to find late spawners to exactly exactly the water temperature feature was just it was a key player in this one. And I mean, you can almost see that brake line where those pre-spawners were sitting and then they probably just migrated right back in there as soon as that. Yeah, I mean, they had to be piled because we literally have that's the fifth. It's like a fish every cast for eight hours. And again, these guys, it's eight hour tournament. They split the lake into halves. So I think they actually kind of this little section right here. I think where they split it. And so they had to run from down here all the way up into here to fish that first half. That's a 25 minute boat ride just to get there. That's like a fish every three minutes. Yeah. So I mean, there's, you know, 45 minutes out of their eight hour day that they couldn't even be casting and they still got that. So I mean, it was just insanity. I think 30th place still had like a hundred pounds. But one thing that caught my eye growing up, I've always been told fish the northern side of the blakes, fish the northern base in the spring, the northern base will warm quickest, the northern base. But if I look at the map here, it almost looks like the southern shore lines have more orange and more red to them than the northern shorelines. Yeah, I was looking at that. I think, especially this time of the year, we're still having cold nights and on a shall ower fishery, especially where you know, you're gonna have fish that are spawning. So like in a shallow bay and stuff, I think, I think wind can also impact water temperature before, you know , before the whole system gets situated for the summertime bite. Yeah. So it'd be interesting to look at the kind of wind effects for the last week on that fishery and see what the wind has been like, if that's kind of caused some of the water temperature, because I know there's been, you were telling me before, kind of a really wacky spring up here in Minnesota. I don't, I don't ever remember a spring like this. We've had 90 degree days followed by 45 degree days followed by 80 degree days. I mean, you're just trying to find any consistency. Was that a lightning feature on that? Where you can see? We do. Okay. We've got storm cells and lightning features. Heck, I use Omni Pro all the time and I have not used a lightning feature. That 's, is that like kind of real time lightning? So I can pull up that app and see like if I'm, if I'm in danger? That's exactly what it is. I like that. So I'm trying to find some cells here. Yeah. The one time that there's no, uh, yeah, the one time that there's nothing going on in the United States. Always something going on. Oh my gosh, that is absolutely fantastic. Yeah. So that's, that's real time that those are real lightning strike indications. Yeah. So like if I'm fishing, whatever that lake is, uh, right there, you know, some's probably coming. Yeah, Richland chambers. I'm, I'm thinking about putting it on the ramp right now. And it's, if we get the storm cell layer to that and you kind of, it gives you an indication of where these storms are headed. Yep. So that's headed right there. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. No , I'm not, I don't mess around with lightning. No, no, almost a lot of stuff. Pattern is boat on the ramp in lightning. But yeah. So I mean, those are just some of the great features that Omnipro offers you. Again, with the hard bottom with water temperatures, we've had a few guys calling indicating that they've been using this for especially spring tournaments and such as a huge the thing that I also like is you can go in and look at recommended baits, what people have put it on Omnia. It's, it's really accurate. Like that to me, there's a potential for that to kind of be a crapshoot and I go in and look at it. I'm like, yeah, everything that's there. That's what I would throw a Whopper ploppard jig, a beaver, a black and blue chatter bait, all the stuff for Oklahoma. That's telling you before trick where like all that stuff is applicable and relevant, which is also really nice. If you're going on a fishing trip anywhere in the part of the country, you can start with your basis and the Omnipro offers you the mapping to kind of give you the starting spot. But one of the things that I really liked about Omnium and BTS sign with them was it wasn't just a hey, buy the tackle. I liked the interactive aspect of it. I liked the interaction with the Omnia staff in the Omnipro app and things like that. So that's one of the cool things that I like about that app and that feature is regardless of whether you're a tournament angler who is going to compete at a high level or you're a weekend angler who just wants a starting spot and some baits that you know will get bit. That's kind of the beauty of the Omnipro . I'm glad you brought that up because that's really where we try to set ourselves apart aside from my fails. We don't want to just give you the what we want to give you the why. We want to help you to develop your own patterns so that you can go out and catch your own. Now I will say the seven inch Nesee four white bass may be a tad ambitious, but when it comes for the largemouth, all that stuff is spot on. Yeah, that one might be a little that was a that was a big white bass. That was a that that may or may not have been a hybrid. We might want to we might want to check the report on that once. Yeah, that's looking hybridish. Yeah. Yeah, that's a hybrid. That's a hybrid. Which grain has a ton of them this last winter. I went out and I didn't know I guess they stock them cyclically every couple of years. They only live like five or a little hybrid in photo closes show out. So they only live like five to seven years. And then they die because they don't reproduce because they're hybrids. So went out this winter and there's like a really good year class of four or five year old fish that are all six to eight pounds. And when they come through, it is just like a herd of like a flock of locus. It's unbelievable. Like they just roll through that part of the creek and it's just and then you can actually follow them and stuff. It's probably not great for the bass population, but by God, it's fun to catch them. No, that's something we don't really have up here. We've got we do have white bass. We got white bass. We don't have the stripers of the hybrid. Yeah, that'd be cool to get in on something. Yeah. Well, thanks for joining us today, Matt. We really appreciate you swinging in. I know you're yeah. I mean, again, you're border to border these days running all over the place. So we really appreciate you swinging in, spending some time with us and chatting about some leaks. Thanks for having me on. Like I said, always a good stop, a good breakup of the drive to stop by Omni and just outside of the Twin Cities here in Minnesota. So thanks for having me. Absolutely. [Music]