Entry 122-3
Mark Rose Goes Head-to-Head With Classic Champ Omori
How the Tournament Unfolded
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 Takahiro do during the tournament?
Rose: During the first couple of days of practice, he'd caught some really-big bass upriver, and he really wasn't competing against me. He was looking at that $500,000 first place payday. So he did what any great fisherman would do. He went upriver and tried to catch those big bass, but the big fish didn't pay for him. He didn't get a lot of bites, and he didn't get any of the big-bass bites he was betting on to win the tournament. He went for the homerun, and it just didn't happen for him. If I'd just won a major tournament and had my family financially secure, I would have probably done what he did. On the first day of the tournament he had 9 pounds, and I had caught 9 pounds 11 ounces. On the second day, I'd taken 10 pounds 8 ounces of bass, and he had 8 pounds. So I beat him by about 3 pounds.
SK: You didn't catch that many pounds of bass with only limits of 13-inch fish, did you? Surely you had one or two nice bass. What were you doing to get those better fish?
Rose: On the last day of practice, the water level in the lake rose slightly. During the practice days, I went to the grass patches to try and catch one or two largemouths that I thought might be my bigger fish, but the grass only had 1/2- foot of water on it, not quite enough to float a bass. But on that last day of practice, the water came up in the lake, and the grass then had about 1-1/2 feet of water on it, just enough water depth for the bass to move up into the grass and feed. While I was looking at the grass, I saw bass chasing some small shad that had also moved into the grass. So, I took a Strike King pearl colored Bleeding Bait 3/16-ounce spinner and started fishing it over the grass. This cover matched the hatch perfectly, and I caught a 4-pound largemouth over the grass on the last day of practice.
In the back of my mind, I said to myself, "Now I have a place to catch a kicker fish after I get my limit of bass out on the rock pile." So, I felt more confident. Each day I'd go to the rock pile, catch my limit, primarily of spotted bass, and then go to the grass and catch my kicker fish. Each of the days I fished against Takahiro I caught a 4-pound largemouth off the grass. On the third day when I went out to fish after the contest between Takahiro and me had ended, I knew I was in trouble because the lake level had gone down about 5 inches. I caught my limit off the rock pile, but the bass had pulled out of the grass, and my limit wasn't enough to get me into the finals.
