Adam Wagner of Cookeville, Tenn. brought a five-bass limit to the scale Saturday weighing 16-01 to win the three-day Dale Hollow Lake Central Toyota in Byrdstown, Tenn. Wagner’s three-day total of 12 bass weighing 34-06 earned him the win by 5 ounces over 2nd-place angler Blake Smith of Byrdstown, and earned Wagner the top payout of $62,761, including the lucrative $35,000 FLW Phoenix Bonus contingency award in the third and final regular-season tournament for the Central Division.
“I’m just blown away,” said Wagner, the 2009 BFL All-American Champion who earned his 15th career victory in FLW competition. “I got lucky. I just absolutely pulled up dead on top of that school of fish. If that’s not meant to be, I don’t know what to say – it just blows my mind.”
The school of fish Wagner referenced was the “mother lode” he found in the afternoon of day 2. He said he didn’t have enough time to pluck a big bag from the school, but he knew he found something special to go back to on Saturday.
“I was pulling up to fish a grass spot [Friday] and I just went across this ditch and [my graph] just lit up,” he explained. “It’s two long, flat points going into a gut of a pocket. There was a school of shad in 49 foot of water, and apparently every largemouth that lives on those points was in that gut.”
Wagner said he’s not a “deep-water guy,” but has the confidence to do something he knows isn’t his forte. He also credits local knowledge and having the right baits on the deck at the right times – namely a 5/8-ounce Silver Buddy blade bait.
After finding his winning school on Friday, Wagner said he used the Silver Buddy to pluck a few largemouth from deep water to make the Top-10 cut. He then went back to his school Saturday morning and caught a couple keepers before hitting a few other spots to give the school time to set up.
Wagner said when he returned, it was game on.
“The shad had ganged up a little better, like the bass had bunched them up a little more,” he explained. “As the day went on it got better. Saturday was fun.”
As much fun as Wagner had both catching the biggest bag of the tournament and holding up the resulting trophy and $62,761 check, he continued to go back to the providence of it all.
“I just can’t believe it,” he said. “That I found that school of fish – at noon Friday I didn’t have a fish. If I had gone over 10 or 15 yards, I would have never seen them.”
Here are the final totals for the Top 10:
1. Adam Wagner: 34-06
2. Blake Smith: 34-01
3. Dakota Ebare: 29-01
4. Jonathan Bowling: 26-13
5. Chris Malone: 24-12
6. Nick Ratliff: 21-08
7. Scott Stults: 19-08
8. Drew Boggs: 18-07
9. Marshall Deakins: 18-00
10. Billy Hall: 15-05
