PHOTO: MAJOR LEAGUE FISHING/PHOENIX MOORE - Monroe was stoked to find out this afternoon that he earned a $500 bonus for being the Group A winner, but he’s also looking forward to being among the 40 competitors on Saturday in the Knockout Round.
“I’m super excited about it,” he said. “I’ve literally gotten four hours of sleep the whole week. I barely slept last night because I was so excited to go fishing. I’m just hoping I’m so tired today that I’ll just fall asleep and not wake up until late tomorrow.”
He said since he was in a comfortable position on the leaderboard, he devoted all of today to gearing up for the next round.
“I was going to watch the leaderboard and if guys got close to me, then I’d go hammer on my fish,” he said. “That didn’t happen and I rode by my spot multiple times and never saw anybody there, so I left it.”
That allowed him to test some theories and identify some new areas for the weekend.
“Any chance you have to go out and practice is good,” he said. “I never fished anything today that I practiced on.”
He caught a 4-pounder at his first stop, then picked off a 3-pounder an hour later, but he wasn’t satisfied despite those being his two biggest fish of the day.
“It was too slow,” he said. “I needed to be consistently catching fish, so I learned if you keep moving you’ll keep catching them. I must have burned 40 gallons of fuel running around looking at new stuff.”