“I
guess I’m just the middleman in all
this,” quipped Mark Rose after
John Cox was proclaimed the champi-
on of the 2016 Forrest Wood Cup.
Indeed, the Arkansas angler was
near the middle of the standings at
tournament’s end, having wound up
sixth overall after placing fifth, seventh
and sixth in the previous three rounds.
Finishing as high as he did was a
testimonial to Rose’s versatility, howev-
er, as he had to abandon his usual deep-
water game, lighten up his tackle and
go shallow to stay in the hunt.
“I tried to find some kind of offshore
bite in practice, but for some strange rea-
son it just wasn’t happening for me or
anybody else, or at least not to the extent
I would have needed to win,” says Rose.
Instead, he went looking for
schools of bass that were waylaying
shad moving in and out of creek
mouths. Rose alternated between First
Creek and Second Creek near Wheeler
Dam during the middle hours of each
day, though first thing in the morning
he picked random keepers off the
shoreline with a buzzbait, typically
fishing main-lake banks with pea
gravel or riprap.
“My [Tour] roommate, Greg Bohannan,
told me he got a little buzzbait bite going in
practice, so that’s what made me decide to
try it – good thing,” recalls the Arkansas
pro. “Until about 9 o’clock in the morning,
the baitfish weren’t stirring much, and
there wasn’t any schooling activity to speak
of where I was fishing.”
Rose relied on soft plastics for the
bulk of his four limits weighed in dur-
ing the event. Once the morning bite
slowed, he switched from a 3/8-ounce buzzbait with a toad trailer to a 1/8-
ounce shaky head paired with a 6 1/2-
inch Strike King Finesse Worm in the
morning dawn color.
Like several other competitors, the
Arkansas pro noticed in practice some
schooling activity inside and outside
the mouths of various creeks, but the
fish would only stay at the surface for a
few seconds before following the shad
into shallower water.
“They might be busting over 20 or 30
feet of water, but then they’d be gone so
quick you couldn’t get on them,” adds
Rose. “That didn’t mean they weren’t still
hungry, though. Sometimes I could cast
toward the bank onto a pea gravel point
into about 6 or 8 feet of water and get bit
coming out with it. Mainly, this was from
about 9 until noon or 1 o’clock each day.
After that, it was pretty much dead.”
he’s capable of getting the job done
with other lures and techniques too.
At the Forrest Wood Cup, it was aban-
doning a deep-water strategy early in
the tournament that mainly helped
him claim a high finish.
“I thought I was going to be fishing
this tournament offshore, and that’s
how I expected to win it if I was going
to win it at all,” Rose reveals. “When I
saw that wasn’t going to happen, I
switched to the buzzbait and to fishing
shallow brush piles and points where there was some schooling activity
going on. Being as versatile as possible
has helped me win a lot of money and
make a living.”
In the opening round, Rose culled
four times. Otherwise, he culled one
or two keepers a day.
“In a four-day tournament, it isn’t
how many you catch, but how big your
20 keepers are,” says Rose. “Except for
a couple of guys like Michael Neal and
Jeremy Lawyer, there just weren’t a lot
of fish being caught.”
ROSE’S KEYS TO SUCCESS
In the Western movie Quigley Down
Under, the hero of the tale is known
for his skill with a Sharps rifle. At the
end, however, the villain provides
Quigley with a revolver and forces him
into a gunfight. After he shoots his
adversary with the Colt, Quigley tells
him, “I said I never had much use for a
revolver. I never said I didn’t know how
to use it.”
In some ways, Rose is like Quigley
when it comes to bass fishing. Though
he’s known as an offshore specialist,
A buzzbait worked for Rose in the
mornings. He switched to soft
plastics for schoolers after that.
OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2016 I FLWFISHING.COM
65