On Feb. 8, Riley Harris and Luke Potter put together a day on Sam Rayburn Reservoir that their great-grandchildren will likely be talking about someday. Teaming up to try their hand against more than 150 other boats in the first event of the 2025 Texas Team Trail, Harris and Potter boated a five-fish limit worth 41 pounds, 9 ounces. Their haul was a full 16 pounds-and-change heavier than the second place team, with 25 pounds, 4 ounces.
Let me put it another way, the second place team had five fish that averaged more than 5 pounds each. That’s a great bag. Harris and Potter could have thrown back two of the fish in their bag and they still would have come out on top with only their best three fish.
A dominant performance no doubt. But how did this momentous day of fishing come about? We caught up with the dream team from Texas to find out.
The Plan
While both anglers have spent a good bit of time on Sam Rayburn, it was Harris’s recent experience competing on this historic fishery that tipped the guys off on where to start.
“I knew what the fish were doing in the Toyota Series,” Harris told Wired2Fish. “They had been as offshore as I’ve ever seen them on Rayburn. I wanted to start way offshore and then start working my way into areas where I expected them to be.”
Checking out one particular spot that Harris found during his previous tournament produced a 7-pounder immediately in practice. The duo quickly packed up and moved on to try to expand on their pattern. While they did find some other promising places, when tournament day came, they ran straight to their sweet spot where they pulled the 7.
“We pulled up there first thing in the morning,” Potter said. “Riley launches in there and gets hung up, and then pulls up there, and sees them on 360 and he was like, ‘Oh my God, dude there’s like 40 pounds here.’”
Though Humminbird’s 360 technology is phenomenal, there has yet to be a transducer released that is able to locate and weigh fish for you. But Harris’s words proved to be prophetic, nevertheless.
“He fired up in there and caught one,” he said. “I fired up in there and hooked another right as he got his in the livewell. We threw them in the livewell and looked at each other and were like, ‘Dude, we’ve got 16 or 18 pounds here.’”
With two fish over 8 pounds each already occupying “the big side” of the livewell just a few minutes in, the team hit the gas. Harris and Potter made their first cast at 7 a.m. By 7:30, they had around 35 pounds in the boat. After a few more culls, Potter remembered what Harris had said earlier about their sweet spot.
“About 9 o’clock, I look at him and say, ‘I think you were serious when you said there was 40 pounds in here.’ We were just in shock really,” Potter said.
“We ended up culling a couple of times,” Harris added. “We kept throwing back giants that just couldn’t make it. At 9:04, we made our last cull on one that was a hair over 7, and that’s what put us at 41-9.”
It would have been tough to improve on their bag at that point. With their smallest fish over 7 pounds — and having culled another 30-pound limit of fish — they decided it was for the best to head back to the dock so they could weigh-in as soon as the scales opened at noon.
They decided to assess their catch at the dock. Those first two kickers that had gone into “the big side” to start the day hadn’t been bothered since. When they pulled the bigger of the two out of the well to look it over, Potter got particularly fired up.
“I was like, ‘Dude, that’s a double-digit.’ and Ryan’s like, ‘No way.’ And I was like, ‘Weigh it, weigh it,’” Potter said. “It was around 10 1/2 on his scale. We were even more shocked then when we realized we could possibly win ‘big fish.’”
That bass did end up taking home big fish honors for the event, coming in at 10 pounds, 11 ounces on the official scales. In the chaos of trying to boat two bass over 8 pounds and keep the school fired up, Harris and Potter truly don’t know which one of them caught the big one.
“We don’t even know who caught her, because it was happening so quickly,” said Harris. “We fired up there that morning and one of us caught an 8 1/2, and one of us caught her.”
At the end of the day, in a team tournament, it all pays the same, no matter who caught it. For their efforts, Harris and Potter took home a grand total of $56,984, including a 2025 Ranger Z518 package.
“I don’t think we’re ever going to forget that day for as long as we live,” Potter reflected. “We’re both still in shock from it. I’m texting him and he’s texting me even today: ’Is this real?’”
The Winning Pattern
As the water starts to warm around the country, fish will begin to move up from deep water towards shallow water. These bass are looking for areas to stage in proximity to the shallow spawning bays and flats while still keeping a little deep water at their backs.
“You’ll start finding those big females grouped up on a hard spot or in a drain,” Harris said. “They’ll start staging up there. And if there are gizzard shad nearby, that’s a big plus.”
What Harris and Potter found on Sam Rayburn was a textbook pre-spawn staging area: a stretch of hard bottom spanning roughly 100 yards with a little bit of standing timber and deep and shallow water nearby.
“It was really just a subtle little hard spot,” Harris said. “It’s really kind of sneaky. I think that might be why they were really in there. They don’t get a whole lot of pressure in there.”
As for how they broke the spot down, the duo relied heavily on their Humminbird 360 unit, covering the area thoroughly with a 6th Sense 400 DD crankbait.
“Most of it came off cranking, just seeing them on 360 and picking apart that area,” Potter said. “And then, here and there, we did scope a little bit towards the end of the morning, right before we decided to head in.”
The fish were hanging so close to the bottom that Harris and Potter actually found it easier to locate them using 360 than forward-facing sonar — the bass blended in with the bottom more on FFS.
“We just keyed in on that 360, knowing that there were fish there from practice,” Potter said. “And I think one of our bigger 8-pounders came on a blind cast on a crank.”
Harris, who stepped away from competitive fishing for a while to start his own business, offered these final thoughts about teaming up with Potter to fish the Texas Team Trail.
“When we got back into tournament fishing, we wanted to fish against the best on Rayburn, just because it would push us to be better. And that’s really just a testament and a tip of the hat to the rest of the guys out there.
“They bring it every time, and you’ve gotta be on your A-game to fish against them. It was nice for all the hard work and all the hours to finally come together and win a big tournament.”
