Entry 122-2
Mark Rose Goes Head-to-Head With Classic Champ Omori
Swing for the Fence or Get on Base
Editor's Note: Strike King Pro Team member, Mark Rose, won $16,000 at the FLW Championship in Birmingham, Alabama, in August, 2004. However, in one of the most-significant events at the championship, Rose was pitted against Takahiro Omori, who had won the 2004 Bassmaster Classic only a few weeks earlier. Omori was riding high, since he was the first Japanese angler to win the Classic and had won one of the biggest purses in competitive fishing. At the FLW tournament, Omori was fishing for $1/2 million. We wondered what Rose's game plan was to defeat the latest Bass Classic Master's champion and asked him to tell us his winning strategy.
SK: What did you think Takahiro would do to not only beat you but to win the tournament?
Rose: During practice, I'd seen Takahiro up river. At Logan Martin Lake near Birmingham, Alabama, if you go upriver to fish, you stand a really good chance of catching a very-big bag of bass. That area is where you'll find most of the largemouth, and the spotted bass are downriver primarily. So you'll probably that anyone who wants to win the tournament will concentrate his fishing upriver. However, upriver fishing at Logan Martin Lake is a two-edged sword. Sure, you can catch a big bag of bass up there, but you can also strike out just as easily. So, you have the option of fishing upriver and betting on that big stringer of bass and knowing that if you don't find them, you'll strike out. Or, you can fish for the spotted bass downriver and hope you can locate spotted bass big enough to keep you in the contest. I knew that if there was a lot of current coming through the lake, and that if the largemouths started biting, Takahiro would be hard to beat. But I decided to fish mid-lake and try and make sure I got a limit.
SK: How does Takahiro fish?
Rose: Takahiro doesn't fit your perception of the Japanese fisherman. Most of us tend to think that the Japanese fishermen fish with little lures and light line and are primarily finesse bait fishermen, however, Takahiro doesn't. To win the 2004 Bassmaster Classic, he was flipping the first two days. However, as the water started to fall, he began fishing crankbaits in somewhat-deeper water. He stayed up with the movement of the bass and the techniques required to catch them, which proved to me that he was a pretty-versatile angler. I decided he would be a threat regardless of water and weather conditions or what type of tactics he needed to use to make the bass bite. I'd also seen him win a BASS Open tournament using a Carolina rig and other tournaments during the pre-spawn and the summertime skipping a worm under bushes. I knew Taqkahiro a highly-adaptable, highly-versatile and a genuinely good bass fisherman.
SK: Knowing that Takahiro was going to swing for the fence and that he was a very versatile and extremely-good fisherman, what kind of game plan did you lay out to try and beat him?
Rose: Any time I go to a big tournament I first of all want to find a place where I can catch a limit of bass, which is especially important when you're fishing an FLW tournament where you only have to fish against one man. If your competitor stumbles and doesn't catch a limit, and you have your limit, then you win - not like a BASS tournament where you're fishing against 200 or 300 other anglers. In a FLW tournament, you only have one man to beat each day you fish. So getting a limit was the most-important key I believed in fishing against Takahiro. This time of year was when bass liked to school. I knew that if I could find a school of bass that I could catch a limit of keepers. Then I'd be in the game and have a chance to win.
SK: Did you find a school of bass?
Rose: Yes, in six days of practice, I located a school of spotted bass out in the mouth of a creek. I learned I could catch these bass on a Strike King Series 5 crankbait. The color the fish seemed to prefer was chartreuse with a blue back, what I consider a standard color to fish in off-colored water during the summer months.
SK: What made the spot you were fishing hold that school of bass?
Rose: When I'm hunting a school of bass in the summertime, I like to try and find a small hump, a small point or a small secondary point out on the end of an underwater creek channel that runs into a main river channel. A place like this works especially well when you're fishing a lake like Logan Martin that is current-oriented. The bass in this type of lake like to ambush lake fish that come around a point or a hump. Many times you'll locate a large school of bass holding behind one rock or one rock pile.
SK: What creek mouth were you fishing?
Rose: I was just outside the mouth from Poorhouse Creek on Logan Martin Lake.
SK: On what were the fishing holding?
Rose: I'd located an underwater rock pile just around the end of the main lake point. The fish were really schooling on that rock pile. I knew the rock pile and fish were there because God sent me a clue. I saw some 4-inch-long threadfin shad jumping out of the water at that spot. I went over to that spot with my depth finder and located a rock pile.
SK: Why did you pick the Series 5 crankbait?
Rose: The rock pile came up to within 5 feet of the surface of the water and then dropped off to about 9-feet deep - the perfect range to fish the Series 5. My boat was sitting in 15 feet of water, I was casting to 5 feet of water, and the bass were attacking in about 7-9 feet of water. Although I caught one 3-pound bass off that site, most of the bass were only about 13-inches long. So I felt confident that I could catch a limit of bass at that size.
