Entry 33-5
Mark Davis
When the Series 6 Crankbait Saved the Day for Mark Davis
Editor's Note: Mark Davis, 38, of Mount Ida, Arkansas, who won the BASS Masters Classic in 1995 and the Angler-of-the-Year title in 1995, 1998 and 2001, never has had a career outside the fishing industry. Davis is ranked third by www.BassFan.com for bass-fishing expertise.
Question:Mark, what's another time when Strike King saved your day of bass fishing?
Davis:The year was 2001, and it was after the Wheeler tournament. We were fishing in east Tennessee around Knoxville. I was in the lead of the Angler-of-the-Year race at this point and just needed to have one more good solid finish to win that title. I had caught a number of bass on shallower-running crankbaits, Series 4 and Series 5, during practice. The fish seemed to be moving out deeper and deeper as the tournament continued.
On the fourth day of that event, I located a school of fish in a creek, but they were moving. I was trying to stay up with them. The lake wasn't falling. However, the water temperatures were warming, and the fish were migrating to deeper water. I finally had to abandon those shallower-running crankbaits and start using the deeper crankbaits on this particular school of fish.
I went to the Strike King Series 6, which was the deepest-diving lure. I put that lure on 10-pound-test line to try and get it down, and at times I even dropped down to 8-pound-test-line. Making long casts to try to get that lure deep, I located that school of fish. They had moved out into the creek a long ways out on a ledge.
On this last day, I needed that extra depth out of that Series 6 crankbait. Strike King saved the day for my partner too because I gave him one of my lures. We sat there and caught and released lots of bass. We quit counting at 150 bass. We caught those fish on those Strike King Series 6 lures. The best color was watermelon shad, which was a pearl color with kind of a lime-green back.
All the bass were keepers. Every one of those fish was 12- to 15-inches long. We were throwing most of the fish back, and every now and then we would get a larger one that we would keep. But I ended-up with about a 17-pound stringer when it was all said and done. Strike King saved the day, and I won Angler of the Year that day because of it.
