GUNTERSVILLE, Ala. — The Bass Pro Tour’s live scoring has delivered several dramatic, buzzer-beater finishes during its first seven seasons. But rarely, if ever, has there been a more closely contested end to a Qualifying Round than at B&W Trailer Hitches Stage 1 Presented by Mercury.
Rookies Banks Shaw and Jacob Walker, both fishing their first regular-season Bass Pro Tour event, spent much of the day dueling for the top spot on SCORETRACKER®, hoping to earn the automatic trip to the Championship Round awarded to the Qualifying Round winner. For a while it looked like that spot would belong to Shaw – with 40 minutes left before lines out, he led Walker by 17 pounds.
But Walker hit a late flurry winding a bladed jig around shallow vegetation and slowly reeled Shaw in. It took him until the final minute, when he swung a 4-pound, 2-ounce Lake Guntersville largemouth into the boat with 20 seconds left, to finally take the lead.
“That was awesome,” Walker said. “That’s why this format is so good. I’m glad to have one of those moments.”
That last-minute catch brought Walker’s two-day total to 174-9 on 48 scorable bass, 12 ounces ahead of Shaw. The two rookies topped the rest of the field by more than 30 pounds. However, with weights zeroing overnight, the race to join Walker in Sunday’s Championship Round will be wide open when the rest of the Top 25 takes the water for the Knockout Round.
Full results can be found here.
Walker makes the right calls
While Stage 1 marks the first regular-season Bass Pro Tour event for Walker, he had some experience with the format – and on Guntersville, too. He competed in REDCREST last spring and finished 17th – a solid showing, but one that Walker felt could have been higher with better strategy.
In that event, Walker said he burned too many fish trying to win the Qualifying Round. So, he started Friday with no real plan to win the round, but understanding how to use SCORETRACKER® to gauge how much it might take to do so. When the catch rates were slower than he expected among the leaders, he did some calculations and decided it might actually be worth it to shoot for an automatic spot in the Top 10, as the payout jumps $5,000 from 11th place to 10th and he could give his areas a day to rest Saturday.
“I started poking around on that shallow stuff and started fishing some stuff, just practicing, and I noticed how slow it was,” Walker said. “I’m like, ‘man, it’s so slow, I might be able to win today.’ So, I kind of let everybody else’s fish catches tell me what I needed to do.”
Walker got back on the shallow bladed jig bite that had carried him on Day 1 and caught more than 50 pounds in periods 2 and 3. He boated seven for 23-2 in the last 37 minutes.
“A lot of these guys are fishing strictly hydrilla or strictly milfoil, strictly eelgrass, and a lot of what I’m doing, I’ll get to hit hard bottom, eelgrass and hydrilla all in one cast,” Walker explained. “I’ve got two or three defined changes and edges those fish use, and that’s why I think it’s so good.”
His most clutch call came with about 6 minutes left. Walker had ceded a stretch of grass to a local boat but noticed that angler didn’t hit one prime corner. When they left, Walker ran back to it, and it produced the last-minute 4-pounder.
Walker, who is throwing his bladed jig on straight braid, called the power fishing “extremely fun.”
“If you get wind, it’ll blow that fluorocarbon over and you’ll have a big bow in your line, and a lot of times when these big ones come up and bite it, they’re eating it and moving toward you,” he said. “They’re always moving after they eat the bait. And so having that braid allows me to feel the bite. … And you get one of those big 6-, 7-pounders, they’ve got big mouths, and when they eat that bait and move toward you, that braid doesn’t stretch. That’s why you see me hammer them. Like, I hammer them as hard as I can with braid, and my drag is tightened down as far as it can get.”
Walker’s shallow bite has been so productive that he’s considering not even using a period targeting suspended fish with forward-facing sonar during the Championship Round. While he’ll have a day off to ponder his strategy, he’s not going to hyper-fixate on it. In fact, he’s planning to fish a tournament on nearby Smith Lake with some friends and possibly add $25,000 to his weekend earnings total.
That should indicate that Walker is confident in his preparation for this event. He’s hopeful his best areas will reload by Sunday, but he also knows it’ll likely take a huge day to win.
“My confidence level is good, but I also understand this is an unbelievable fishery, and a lot of guys probably just didn’t go hard today,” he said. “So, it’s not going to be easy. I know I’m going to have to work for it.”
Shaw still looks dangerous
Unsurprisingly, Shaw proved during his first two days of Bass Pro Tour competition that he’ll have no trouble applying his skill set to the every-fish-counts format. However, as Walker experienced last year, he admitted that the strategy involved in the BPT’s multi-round format presented a new challenge, and he learned a few lessons Thursday.
Shaw, too, spent most of the day not really trying to win the Qualifying Round. But when he found himself near the top of SCORETRACKER® around the midday mark, he figured, why not?
In hindsight, he said he needed to decide at the start of the day whether he wanted to fish for the round win or go all-in on practicing for the weekend. For instance, he left his starting spot with about an hour left in Period 1, when he elected to use forward-facing sonar, so he could check some new water. Had he stayed, he thinks he could have built a big enough lead that Walker wouldn’t have tried to track him down.
“If I had sat there a little bit longer, I definitely could have won the round,” he said. “But I wanted to go look for some new fish and learn, and I was able to eliminate some water and learn one more area better than before.”
Shaw also said he learned the importance of maximizing his time in the BPT format. He noted that he wasted about 30 minutes in the final period trying out a new area that didn’t produce.
“I thought I could kind of go run some new water and catch just a handful of fish, what I would need (to win the round),” he explained. “(Walker) just caught them a little bit quicker than I was expecting. But that’s part of the game, learning.”
Still, Shaw, who made the Top 10 in all seven Tackle Warehouse Invitationals events a season ago, looks well-positioned to carry that streak over to the Bass Pro Tour. He put together the best period with forward-facing sonar of anyone at the event so far with his 63-pound opening period on Day 1, then he showed an ability to stack up weight quickly without the technology Friday afternoon. He thinks there are still plenty of fish left in both of those areas, especially his starting spot.
“I’m going to go to my same area that’s been super good the first period, ‘Scoping,” he said of his Knockout Round game plan. “This morning, it wasn’t as good – just the bait wasn’t there as great. But I definitely think there’s plenty more fish there. It’s pretty crazy the amount of fish that are there. It could very easily be one of those deals where I could make the Championship Round just in the first period, I feel like, if it goes my way.”
Other notes:
- Right behind the two rookies is the most experienced angler in the Bass Pro Tour field. Mark Davis, who is fishing his 40th season on a national tour in 2026, put together the best day of anyone on Day 2 with 88-4 on 27 scorable bass and climbed to third place. The 62-year-old is one of three anglers who didn’t turn on forward-facing sonar at all during the Qualifying Round and the only one of the three to make the Knockout Round.
- Six anglers who started Day 2 below the Lucas Oil cut line rallied to make the Knockout Round. No one did so in more dramatic fashion than Chris Lane. One of four Lake Guntersville locals in the field, Lane started Period 3 in 35th place, nearly 15 pounds back of the cut. He caught nine scorable bass for 30-13 in the final frame, including a 7-8 giant that earned Berkley Big Bass honors for the day. That boosted Lane all the way to 23rd place with a two-day total of 91-14.
Keep following the action
Weights will zero overnight before the Top 25, minus Walker, return to the water for Saturday’s Knockout Round. The top nine finishers will join him in Sunday’s Championship Round, a single-day sprint for the first trophy and $125,000 paycheck of the season.
You can continue to watch all the action live on the MLFNOW! livestream from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. CT each day at MajorLeagueFishing.com, the MLF and MyOutdoorTV (MOTV) apps and the Major League Fishing channel on Rumble.