WACO, Texas — It’s not often that a high-level tournament trail competes on a fishery that has never before hosted a national event. The Bass Pro Tour will visit two such fisheries for Stage 3 of the 2026 season, which will take place on Texas’ Lake Whitney and Lake Waco March 5-8.
Whitney will host the two-day Qualifying Round, while the Knockout and Championship Rounds will be contested just a few miles south on Waco. According to BPT pro and Waco area native Alton Jones, despite their proximity, the two lakes fish very differently, which should make for a fascinating event from a strategy perspective.
What to expect
This event will mark the first time in Jones’ 36-year career as a touring pro that he’s able to sleep in his own bed for an event, something he’s looking forward to. He said Waco and Whitney are different than what many bass fishing fans likely picture when they think of Texas tournament waters – hydrilla flats and fields of flooded timber.
Whitney is a highland reservoir, with deep, clear water and steeper contours, while Waco is a shallower, flatter lowland reservoir. Whitney even has some smallmouth, and Jones thinks a few of them will hit SCORETRACKER®.
“There are smallmouth in Whitney,” he said. “And there are enough to play – not to where someone is going to go out and fish for exclusively smallmouth, but my prediction would be some of the guys that make the cut are going to have a mixed bag. And there’s some good smallmouths, some 4- and 5-pounders.”
Jones expects the BPT field to find most of Whitney’s bass in the prespawn phase. At Waco, they could be on spawning beds, but that depends on the temperature – the shallower lake is much more impacted by weather.
“I would be shocked if they’re spawning on Whitney,” Jones said. “Now, they’ll be within a couple weeks of it, but early March typically is too early for them to actually be bedded, laid up somewhere. Waco, I would say it’s weather dependent. If we’re there on a strong warm trend, we absolutely could have a strong push to the bank. Either way, they’ll be one step out. They’re not going to be far from those type of areas.”
Jones doesn’t expect an event where anglers are reeling in scorable bass every few minutes. But, this being Texas, he thinks we’ll see some big ones hit the scales, including potentially some double-digits.
“If I was going to guess big fish, I would say at Whitney, it’ll be a 9,” Jones said. “If I was going to guess big fish at Waco, I would say it’s going to be a 10-plus. It may be a 12.”
Storylines to watch
- How much of a local advantage will the Joneses have? The elder Jones doesn’t think it will be a significant edge, as the timing of this event should have most of the bass positioned tight to shallow cover near obvious spawning areas. “I don’t have any ace in the hole in my mind that I’m thinking, ‘Boy, nobody will find this,’” Jones said.
- It will be interesting to hear from anglers how much time they spend on each fishery during official practice. They will be afforded a third day of practice rather than the usual two prior to this event, but that’s still not a lot of time to break down two fisheries, especially for the many anglers in the field who have never laid eyes on them before. Do you commit all your time to Whitney and hope you can figure out Waco if you make the cut, or do you devote some practice time to Waco and risk not even making it there?
- The two-fishery split also adds intrigue to the decision of how hard to chase the Qualifying Round win and earn the automatic trip to the Championship Round that comes with it. On one hand, there’s no advantage to using Day 2 to scout new water rather than catching fish, since the Knockout and Championship Rounds will take place on a different fishery. On the other, it’ll likely be much harder to win the event for the angler who skips the Knockout Round and competes on Waco for the first time during the final day.