Winning a tournament on the Bassmaster Elite Series is monumental. And doing it on your birthday? That’s just the “Cherry” on top. Hank Cherry, Elite Series veteran and Classic Champion, found himself in that exact situation at the start of the ’26 Bassmaster Elite Series on Lake Guntersville.
It wasn’t just the fact that he won on his birthday that made the win so special. While he’s won multiple Classics, this is Cherry’s first-ever Elite Series win against the full field. And he certainly overcame adversity, ending day one in 64th place. But by the end of Championship Sunday, his total weight hit 88 pounds, 11 ounces, the highest weight of his entire career.
Here’s how the tournament set up, and how Cherry got himself the best birthday present an angler could ask for.
Bassmaster Elite Series: Lake Guntersville
Freezing Times on Lake Guntersville
Conditions were absolutely freezing at the start of the tournament. An arctic blast rocked the southern U.S., which promised to make the fishing challenging.
Backwaters were iced over, and reports coming out of official practice indicated that water temperatures were hovering in the upper thirties.
“Sunday was the coldest water I’ve ever caught a bass in,“ said Bill Lowen. “It was 36.5 degrees. They’ll still bite in that, but another 5 to 8 degrees and they will really push shallow.”
Still, it’s Lake Guntersville, and the field expected that it would take high weights to win the event.
No Forward-Facing Sonar
To make things even more challenging, this is the first event in the Bassmaster Elite Series to ban the use of Forward-Facing Sonar. Four of this year’s tournaments will not allow the controversial tech, and Guntersville kicked off the new restriction.
No one really knew what to expect. Would there be a resurgence of veteran anglers? Could the young, tech-savvy rookie and sophomore classes keep up? In cold, frigid conditions, FFS is quite literally a game-changer, but the entire field would be without it.
How Hank Cherry Won the Bassmaster Elite Series on Guntersville
It turns out that the old-school anglers and techniques are still contenders. On his 52nd birthday, Hank Cherry took home a blue trophy by fishing a technique older than half of the field.
He caught the majority of his fish on a 3-inch hand-poured chartreuse curly tail grub rigged on a 1/8-ounce ball-head jig. He targeted grass, slowly swimming his grub along the edges.
“Once you learn how to move the bait, it’s very easy,” Cherry said. “The bite’s simple. You don’t lose a lot, except when they straighten out your hook.
“I just paid attention to one grassline, and anytime I went over a group of bait or a group of fish with my DownScan, I would mark it and come back through. I knew today was my day when I looked up in the grass 30 yards away, and the fish were just boiling.”
With that technique, Cherry caught the tournament’s best single-day bag of 27 pounds, 11 ounces on Championship Sunday and jumped from sixth place to first. He took home a $100K paycheck, secured his first blue trophy, caught his personal best tournament weight of his career, and secured a spot to fish for $1.25 million in the Champions tournament this fall. Now, that is a happy birthday.
But, more importantly, he showed everyone that old-school bass fishing is still a thing. I’m sure Chartreuse grub sales are setting records after the weekend. The old guys still got it.
What’s Next
The Bassmaster Elite Series is set to resume Feb. 12-15 on Lake Martin in Alexander City, Ala.
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