Entry 201-5

Wake-Up Bass with Mark Davis

Part 5: The Final Weigh-In

Question: Mark, how did you feel going into the last day?

Davis: Anytime you have an 8-pound lead on the last day of a tournament, on a fairly-difficult body of water, confidence is necessary. I knew that if I could catch 10 or 12 pounds of bass, I’d win. When I arrived at the lake that morning, I knew I was in trouble. Although we had heavy cloud cover, which was good, we also had rain and wind, which were bad for my pattern.

Going into day four, I knew that the wake-bait pattern I stayed with the entire tournament probably wouldn’t carry me to the finish line, because a strong wind or a high wind would kill the wake-bait pattern. I felt certain I could find some other lure that these pre-spawn bass would bite and that I could use a Strike King spinner bait or the Wild Shiner jerkbait to entice these bass to bite. I knew where the bass were holding and that I could pull them up to get them to bite. But I knew I’d have to find another lure to catch them on that wasn’t a wake bait. Early in the morning, after we left the launch, I caught two big smallmouth on my wake baits. I looked for main lake points that weren’t being hammered by the wind. Both my smallmouth weighed more than 3-pounds each.

Question: Why did you decide to stay with the wake baits when you had wind and rain – the two conditions that could kill the King Shad?

Davis: The pattern wasn’t over. The bass would still take the wake bait, if they could see it. I had to find points that I could fish that would let the King Shad and the other wake baits do their designated jobs. I was able to find a few places where I could get out of the wind to fish these wake baits and catch bass. Doing this was the only reason I was able to catch the two smallmouth. However, most of the good spots I really needed to fish were out in the wind. I tried every way I knew to get the bass to bite. I used spinner baits, crankbaits and jerkbaits, and I even tried fishing tubes. I Carolina-rigged to catch the same fish I’d been catching; however, I couldn’t make anything work.

Finally, I decided to return to those pockets out of the wind and fish the Strike King Zero. The Zero had caught some keeper bass, though I culled them. So, I thought that if I could catch a limit with the two big bass I already had, I should be okay. The Zero worked just like I thought it would, when I drew the plan up on the chalkboard. I caught a lot of short bass on the Zero. Luckily, I’d put together a big-enough lead so that when the three fish only weighed 7 pounds, 14 ounces, I was able to win the tournament by a margin of almost 3 pounds.

Question: What does this win mean to you, Mark?

Davis: I didn’t have a win in 2006, so naturally, this win meant a lot to me. I changed leagues, and I’m not fishing B.A.S.S. anymore. This was my first FLW win, so it meant everything to me – not only to get back in the winner’s circle, but also to win in a league where I’d never won before.

Question: What do you plan to do with that $100,000 Mark?

Davis: I plan to use it to raise my three kids and to pay for their college educations. It seems like there never is enough money when you’re raising children.

Question: Mark, what did you learn in this tournament?

Davis: I’m forever a student of bass fishing. Even though I’ve been fishing professionally for 21 years, every day on the water and every event I fish, I learn something. I learned a lot in this tournament about how bass respond to a wake bait during the pre-spawn and even during the spawn. I also re-learned that conditions dictate the pattern needed to catch bass for the day, and that no pattern will work without the right conditions present for that pattern to work at that time, on that lake.

The biggest lesson I learned was how critical patience could be in winning a tournament. The pattern I had to fish on this day was very slow and methodical. I learned that if I was the least-bit antsy and tried to swim those wake baits any faster than dead slow, I couldn’t get the bass to bite. I learned that after I got the bass figured out, I needed to be patient and stay with what I knew. In today’s world of bass fishing, hurrying-up, fishing fast and power fishing rule the tournament days. I’ve learned that there’s a place and a time when patience pays off, and that there’s more than one way to skin a cat, or win a bass tournament.

Contents:

• Part 1: How Davis Found the Winning Pattern
• Part 2: Day 1 of the Competition
• Part 3: Day 2 of the Competition
• Part 4: Day 3 – The Day I Won the Tournament
• Part 5: The Final Weigh-In