LITTLE ROCK — Arkansas anglers are dominating the FLW Tour lately, and Mark Rose of Marion scored the latest victory Sunday at the FLW Open at Wheeler Lake in Alabama.
Rose finished the tournament with four limits that weighed a total of 71 pounds, 6 ounces to win the firstplace prize of $125,000. He led the event from the beginning to boost his career earnings to more than $1.6 million. It was a solid step back to the 2013 Forrest Wood Cup which Rose missed last year.
“That’s the Super Bowl of our sport, and I want to be there every time,” Rose said. “It was really tough for me to have to miss, so this is just a good cap for me on a tough year.”
Rose has long been one of the most consistent performers on the FLW Tour, so last year was uncharacteristic. He said it was a normal valley that all professional competitors endure.
“I’ve got lots of excuses, but I was there and I should have caught them,” Rose said. “I just got off to a really rough start the first couple of tournaments, but after that I got into a more consistent roll. To have a win to cap a season like that was really sweet.”
A lifelong athlete, Rose played sports all through high school and college. He compared his travails to a batting slump, but the difference is that fishing is all mental. There was no mechanical deficiency he could correct.
“There’s no book you can read or pill you can take,” Rose said. “I just fish as hard as I can every day and honor God in the process and leave the results up to Him. I just did my thing, and things started falling into place.”
It all came together at Wheeler, where Rose found big bass on deep ledges. He caught them with crankbaits in depths of 21-25 feet. Crankbaits generally don’t dive that deep. Rose said he modifies his crankbaits to get them to dive deeper, and in this tournament, it was exactly what the bass wanted.
“The key to it was fishing deeper than anyone else,” Rose said. “Lake Wheeler has got a lot of really good shallow water stuff, but I was on groups of fish that hadn’t been touched or messed with very much. They were chunks, a lot thicker than the shallow fish, a better grade of fish. They were so deep, and there were so many of them, and they replenished.”
Rose didn’t catch a lot of fish, and he had to be methodical to get what he got. Modern pros are not always so patient. They tend to run around until they find spots where they can catch a lot of fish and cull their weights upward with an eye at catching one big kicker fish per day. With the help of stateof-the-art electronics, Rose knew his fish were home. He just had to figure out how to catch them.
“A lot of times you want to run around and do other things when they’re not biting, but I like to play with them and find something that might trigger them,” Rose said. “If they’re set up a certain way on my graph, I’ll try different things.”
When he found schools of bass deep, Rose said he used a spoon to break them up, and then went after them with shad-colored crankbaits. He also used a 3/4-ounce Strike King football jig in green pumpkin with a green pumpkin trailer. When he got that combination working, everyone else was fishing for second place.
“It’s awesome to be in ‘the zone,’” Rose said. “In every sport you have that, and fishing is such a mental sport, kind of like golf. It’s just you, the lake and the fish. You don’t depend on anybody else, and you’ve got to make it happen. When everything is clicking right, it’s really awesome.
“And when you come down off it, it’s the worst feeling,” he added. “You feel like there’s not another bass within a hundred miles. When you get in that low spot, you just fish right through it. Something good will happen on the water to get your confidence back.”
In the same tournament, Michael Williamson of Fort Smith finished seventh with 49-9 worth $8,797. Larry Nixon of Bee Branch followed up his FLW Tour victory at Lake St. Clair last month by finishing eighth with 47-6 to earn $8,204. Scott Suggs, winner of the 2007 Forrest Wood Cup, finished ninth with 45-10 for $7,610.
Sports, Pages 23 on 09/27/2012