Alton Jones Jr's Pattern, Baits & Gear
Jones logged his second top-4 finish of the season primarily via sight-fishing, but he changed gears in the final period of both the Knockout and Championship rounds to make big moves up the leaderboard. He advanced to the Knockout Round with a 13th-place finish in qualifying Group B "I wasn't around a lot of fish at Fork, but I was able to grind it out," he said. "Most of the guys fishing around me didn't even make the first cut. About all I can say is I survived it. "I spent the majority of my practice marking beds and I had over a hundred that were for sure scoreable (2 pounds or heavier). I never had a real big starting fish, but being in Group B, that wasn't my goal. Even in the Knockout Round I went to fish that I'd marked on the first day of practice and they were still there."
He was in danger of being eliminated in the Knockout Round until he picked up a Booyah Pad Crasher frog in the latter part of the day and worked his way up to 2nd place. "We were on a little bit of a warming trend and the water temperature got back up in the 60-degree range. I threw the frog in the areas where I'd been trying to sight-fish, but the clouds wouldn't allow it. I just worked it really slow." He tried to sight-fish at Athens Ð a decision that he came to regret. His afternoon surge there came courtesy of a bladed jig. "I spent 5 hours there riding around (competitors were allowed a 6-hour visit on one of their off days), but I never saw any big ones and most of the ones on the beds were spooky; you could tell they were pressured fish. That should've told me early on to look for something else.
"I did catch a 4-pounder doing it early (in the Championship Round), but it was a struggle. I reminded myself that I was there to win, even if it meant I didn't catch another bass the rest of the day. That's when I made the decision to move to the outside grass line with the bladed jig. I wasn't there for points and I had to scrap what I wanted to do and start doing what I needed to do to have a chance to win. It was the first time in my career that I'd made a decision like that. "I fished points of eelgrass in about 8 feet of water," he continued. "I picked apart the key edges and irregularities that might not show up on mapping. Without my Garmin LiveScope I wouldn't have caught those fish."
With 5 minutes left in the round, he caught his final fish (which weighed nearly 4 pounds) on a jerkbait. That bumped him from 4th place to 2nd Ð a difference of $18,000. "I'd caught three good fish there on a blade jig and I used the jerkbait as a clean-up," he said. Other tactics he employed during this three days at Fork included blind-casting a YUM Dinger and throwing a swimbait and a wacky-rigged worm.
Gear:
Sight-fishing gear: 7' heavy-action Kister Z-Bone or Kistler Helium 3 rod, Abu Garcia Revo SX casting reel (7.3:1 ratio), 65-pound Seaguar SmackDown braided line (main line), 25-pound Seaguar fluorocarbon leader, 3/8-ounce tungsten weight, 3/0 or 5/0 straight-shank flipping hook, YUM Bad Mamma or YUM Dinger (green-pumpkin/purple flake).
Bladed jig gear: 7'3" heavy-action Kistler Feel N Reel rod, Abu Garcia Revo STX casting reel (6.4:1 ratio), 17-pound Seaguar InvizX fluorocarbon line, 1/2-ounce unnamed bladed jig (shad), 3 1/2' YUM Pulse trailer (phantom shad).
Jerkbait gear: 6'10" medium-heavy Kistler Magnesium rod, Abu Garcia Revo SX casting reel (7.3:1 ratio), 12-pound Seaguar InvizX fluorocarbon line, unnamed jerkbait (translucent shad).
MLF-BPT Tour Lake Fork & Lake Athens 2-3 Patterns - BassFan 3/23/20 (John Johnson)
