Day: February 10, 2019, The National Angler

GEORGIA’S GROSS WINS FLW TOUR AT LAKE TOHO PRESENTED BY RANGER BOATS

KISSIMMEE, Fla. (Feb. 10, 2019) – Pro Buddy Gross of Chickamauga, Georgia, brought a five-bass limit weighing 23 pounds, 12 ounces, to the scale Sunday towin the FLW Tour at Lake Toho presented by RangerBoats. Gross’ four-day total of 20 bass weighing 85-12 earned him the victory by a 4-pound, 10-ounce margin over second-place pro John Cox of DeBary, Florida, and the $100,000 first-place prize.

“I’m ecstatic. It has been an awesome, awesome journey. To beat the competition that we have – it’s unbelievable,” said Gross, who earned his second career FLW Tour victory. “I came into this event just wanting to cash a check. When I made the top 30, I just wanted stay in the top 10. All I wanted to do was finish strong.

“I got the majority of my weight early today – I’m guessing I had 18 or 19 pounds by 9 (a.m.) and after that it was a grind,” continued Gross. “I worked a long time between bites, but I upgraded two more times – maybe three – at my spot. I can’t believe this place that I caught these fish at held up – I really believe the Lord just blessed me.”

The spot Gross is referring to was on the main span of Lake Toho, just north of the lock at the lake’s southern end. It was his most productive area throughout the event, producing 19 of his 20 fish. He described it as a “pocket” in the grass line that was 30 feet wide and 50 feet in, but that didn’t break through to the other side.

“It was special because it had two ditches with clumps in the middle, and the fish were sitting in the clumps,” said Gross. “There were 20-foot gaps between each clump, and they’d set up in them [the clumps]. The first day I caught them, it was in the ditch, but after that, everything was on the clumps.”

Though Gross described the area as having two ditches, he said the “ditches” weren’t any deeper than the surrounding area. They were just open lanes with no grass. The entire spot was about 7 feet deep.

Gross primarily used a 5- or 6-inch, natural-light-colored Scottsboro Tackle Co. Swimbait on an 8/0-sized Owner Beast Flashy Swimmer and a ½-ounce white custom swimjig with a 4-inch Scottsboro Tackle swimbait trailer of the same color. The same swimjig with a black-and-blue skirt and a green-pumpkin Zoom Z-Craw trailer also came into play. For line, he used 50-pound-test braid on a Daiwa Tatula SV reel. He fished the swimbait on a 7-foot, 3-inch Fitzgerald Rods All Purpose Series extra-heavy rod, but switched to a heavy-action rod of the same length and series for the swim jig.

The top 10 pros on Lake Toho finished:

1^st: Buddy Gross, Chickamauga, Ga., 20 bass, 85-12, $102,700

2^nd: John Cox, DeBary, Fla., 20 bass, 81-2, $30,600

3^rd: Darrell Davis, Dover, Fla., 20 bass, 78-7, $25,000

4^th: Tommy Dickerson, Orange, Texas, 20 bass, 76-14, $20,000

5^th: Josh Douglas, Isle, Minn., 20 bass, 72-8, $19,000

6^th: Wade Strelic, Alpine, Calif., 20 bass, 71-4, $18,000

7^th: Joseph Webster, Winfield, Ala., 20 bass, 66-0, $17,000

8^th: Scott Martin, Clewiston, Fla., 20 bass, 65-10, $16,000

9^th: Aaron Britt, Yuba City, Calif., 19 bass, 64-7, $15,000

10^th: Nitro pro Tyler Woolcott, Port Orange, Fla., 20 bass, 64-3, $14,000

Full results for the entire field can be found atFLWFishing.com.

Overall there were 49 bass weighing 157 pounds, 9 ounces caught by pros Sunday. Of the final 10 pros, nine caught five-bass limits.

Television coverage of the FLW Tour at Lake Toho presented by Ranger Boats will premiere in 2019. The exact air-date will be announced soon. The Emmy-nominated “FLW” television show airs each Saturday night at 7 p.m. EST and is broadcast to more than 63 million cable, satellite and telecommunications households in the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean on the World Fishing Network (WFN), the leading entertainment destination and digital resource for anglers throughout North America. FLW television is also distributed internationally to FLW partner countries, including Canada, China, Italy, Korea, Mexico, Portugal, Spain and South Africa.

The total purse for the FLW Tour at Lake Toho presented by Ranger Boats was more than $860,000, including $9,000 through 65th place in the Pro Division. The tournament was hosted by Experience Kissimmee and the Kissimmee Sports Commission. The next event for FLW Tour anglers will be the FLW Tour at Lake Seminole presented by Costa, in Bainbridge, Georgia, March 7-10. The tournament will be hosted by the Bainbridge Convention & Visitors Bureau.

In FLW Tour competition, the full field of 170 pro anglers competed in the two-day opening round on Thursday and Friday. The top 30 pros based on their two-day accumulated weight advanced to Saturday. Only the top 10 pros continued competition Sunday, with the winner determined by the heaviest accumulated weight from the four days of competition.

Clunn Repeats His Magic Winning Power-Pole Bassmaster Elite At St. Johns River

PALATKA, Fla — After becoming the oldest angler ever to win a Bassmaster Elite Series event in 2016 on the St. Johns River, Rick Clunn provided what has become one of the most famous quotes in professional bass fishing history when he said, “Never accept that all of your best moments are in your past.”

On Sunday, he walked it like he talks it.

Clunn, who turned 72 in July, broke his own record for agelessness, winning the Power-Pole Bassmaster Elite at St. Johns River with a four-day total of 98 pounds, 14 ounces. His amazing week was punctuated on Championship Sunday with a tournament-best limit of five bass that weighed 34-14.

It was the 16th career victory for Clunn, whose $100,000 first-place paycheck put him over $2.5 million in career earnings with B.A.S.S.

“I think this just reinforces what I said after I won here in 2016,” Clunn said. “A long time ago, I stopped paying attention to timelines. The terrible twos, the ugly teens, the midlife crisis, retirement time — I don’t pay any attention to any of that.

“If you listen to everybody else, you’ll get premature notions about who you really are.”

This week, there was no doubt about it. He was “Rick Clunn: Legend.”

The Ava, Mo., angler started modestly with a limit of 17-5 on Day 1. But he inched his way up the standings with 23-11 on Day 2 and then caught 23-0 on Day 3 to make Sunday’s Top 10 cut in eighth place with a three-day total of 64-0.

He joked after Saturday’s semifinal weigh-in that he might need a 10-pounder and a 12-pounder on Sunday to have any chance of winning. While he didn’t quite make those marks, he came close by weighing in two fish over 9 pounds, including a 9-14 that ranked as the biggest bass of the day.

His three key baits all week were a big lipless crankbait from Luck-E-Strike called a Hail Mary, a 3/4-ounce Luck-E-Strike Trickster Spinnerbait with a shellcracker-colored skirt and a Texas-rigged gatortail worm.

“I thought the bream pattern was important for the spinnerbait this week,” Clunn said. “The bass are bedding here, and I know how much the bass really don’t like the bream around their beds.”

The spinnerbait bite improved steadily throughout the week, thanks to a cold front that brought wind and cloud cover to the region. After catching bass on the deeper ends of boat docks in practice, Clunn said the fish had moved so shallow they were under the walkways of the docks by the weekend — and that made for a perfect spinnerbait situation.

In the event that he missed a strike on the spinnerbait, he would follow up quickly with the worm. That was the key to landing his biggest bass Sunday.

“That’s what won it for me today,” he said. “Early in the day, they were eating that spinnerbait really well. I caught a 6 1/2 on it and another one about 4. But then in the middle of the day, I missed three fish on it — and I could tell the third one was a really nice fish.

“I went back with the worm, and it was the 9-14.”

Even with all that he’s accomplished, Clunn admitted the two giant bass on Sunday got his blood pumping.

“I swung every fish into the boat today except those two 9s,” he said. “When you have to sit there and think about all of the possibilities and it takes forever to get them in the boat…it gets your heart moving.”

The two anglers closest in the standings to Clunn were first-year Canadian pro Chris Johnston with 95-2 and veteran Kentucky pro Mark Menendez with 95-1. Johnston said it was an honor to share the stage with Clunn.

“To lose to somebody that you watched fishing for the past 20 years — just to be on the same stage with him — it’s a privilege,” Johnston said. “If I was gonna see anyone else win, I would want it would be Rick. He earned it. He deserves it. He put his time in.

“I can’t complain about second place at my first event.”

Clunn said the question of when he’ll finally give up fishing is “a dirty question.” He’s looking forward to next week’s Toyota Bassmaster Elite at Lake Lanier in Georgia and has no plans of slowing down anytime soon.

“A lot of stuff off the water is old to me,” Clunn said. “But when I go on the water, it’s brand new, just like it was when I started. I love it just as much as I ever have.

“It’s an incredible thing to go out every single day and know that you’ve gotta figure them out. This amazing study of natural rhythms and how all things are connected — I can’t see myself ever getting tired of that.”

During a tournament when giant fish were weighed in all four days, the Phoenix Boats Big Bass of the week was caught during Thursday’s opening round. The honor went to Virginia pro John Crews for the 11-2 largemouth he caught on Day 1.

Rookie pro and former college fishing champion Patrick Walters of South Carolina was fourth with 91-14, and Crews was fifth with 89-11.

The Elite anglers hit the St. Johns River fishery at its peak. The 75 anglers caught 158 five-bass limits and weighed in 893 bass totaling 2,927 pounds, 8 ounces of bass. With an average weight of 3 1/4 pounds and the largest weigh-in crowds in the history of St. Johns Bassmaster tournaments, the event more than lived up to the theme of the 2019 Elite Series: “Big Bass. Big Stage. Big Dreams.”