No one could knock Mark Rose off the ledge this week in the FLW Series Eastern Division bass tournament on Lake Chickamauga.
Rose, known for his “ledge fishing,” took the top spot on the second day and held it through the five-man final round Saturday. He did change his approach from a Kistler spoon-fishing rod and a Strike King Sexy Spoon to a crankbait for his 11 pounds, 8 ounces on the final day of the event based at Chester Frost Park.
Wesley Strader from Spring City, Tenn., closed in again Saturday with a 13-7 bag for a second-place tournament total of 54-6 – 2 pounds and 9 ounces less than Rose’s.
Before the five FLW pros weighed in, Wesley Maples of Dalton, Ga., and partner Jed Thigpen of Waycross, Ga., gave Georgia Southern the victory in the one-day Southeast Division tournament in the National Guard FLW College series.
Maples, a 21-year-old senior geography major from Northwest Whitfield High School, and junior biology major Thigpen brought in six bass totaling 12-3, earning $5,000 for the Statesboro university and another $5,000 for the school’s fishing club. They also qualified GSU for the regional championship.
Georgia College was second, and Kennesaw State, Freed-Hardeman, Troy and Florida were third through sixth. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga duo of Randall (Taylor) Massengill and Alex Craw finished 22nd.
Maples and Thigpen didn’t arrive in Chattanooga until about midnight Friday, after wrapping up their last classes of the day, but the “middle of the lake” spot they found in practice a week earlier paid off in their first tournament together.
“We both felt good about it, so we went to that spot and grinded it out,” Thigpen said.
“We stayed there the whole day,” added Maples, who was third in a college tournament on Lake Okeechobee in Florida last year.
“We originally thought we were going to go to the grass and possibly get some on a frog,” he said, “but that didn’t pan out. So we abandoned that and went deep the rest of the day.”
He said in an FLW release that he and Thigpen used homemade football-head jigs and Carolina rigs tipped with green pumpkin Zoom lizards and caught about 20 bass in all.
Another duo from GSU’s club of about 20 anglers will compete in the final Southeast tournament of the 2010 FLW college series next month on Pickwick Lake.
Rose got $44,778 in prize money and a $6,000 Ranger Cup bonus for his third career FLW Outdoors victory, and runner-up Strader collected $17,911. Tom Mann Jr. of Buford, Ga., finished third at 54-4 and received $13,433; and Andy Montgomery of Blacksburg, S.C., and Pete Thliveros of St. Augustine, Fla., were fourth and fifth at 52-9 and 51-1 and got $8,956 and $8,060.
“Pete T” was second to Strader in Saturday’s haul with 12-4.