Mark Rose on Ledge Fishing: ‘My Career has Changed Because of It’

HOT SPRINGS, Arkansas – A brief look at Major League Fishing Select angler Mark Rose’s tournament-fishing resume is all it takes to understand why the Arkansas pro is nicknamed “The Ledge Master”.

Rose is No. 3 on the all-time list of money-winners in FLW history with just over $2.3 million, which includes eight wins and 47 Top 10s. Even more notable is the fact that seven of his eight victories (and roughly 40 percent of his career earnings) have come on offshore/ledge-dominated fisheries like Pickwick Lake, Kentucky Lake and Guntersville Lake.

“If you ever want to feel bad about your offshore knowledge, have Mark Rose come in behind you and catch 5- and 6-pounders off the same ledge where you can only catch 2-pounders,” jokes MLF Select pro Zack Birge. “Mark is just so good at picking apart the offshore ledge stuff.”

But it took a career epiphany to start Rose down the path of becoming the Ledge Master.

“Ten years into my career, I was an above-average shallow-water fisherman at best,” Rose admits. “I had some solid finishes and was making a living, but I had no wins. After doing it for 10 years, I needed a breakthrough in my career. I needed to make some kind of change.”

And so Rose began to analyze. He examined the successes of anglers like David Fritts, who racked up a whopping five wins and seven second-place finishes in six years of BASS competition in the early 1990s, most of it due to his proficiency in fishing crankbaits. 

“Guys like Fritts were doing things in five casts that took me an entire stressful day to do fishing the bank,” Rose says. “I figured that I’d tried for 10 years to win, I’d better not go another 10 doing the exact same things. The offshore bite was something that I hadn’t tapped into at all, so I thought to myself ‘Maybe that’s something you should learn about’.”

And learn he did.

Rose began to read voraciously about offshore fishing, and specifically about his electronics. He pored over his manuals, read and re-read magazine articles written by well-known offshore anglers, and then methodically began to re-apply the things he already knew about shallow-water fishing to the offshore environment.

“Until I took the time to read my electronics manual – and I mean really read it and understand what I was looking at – I’d just try to take shortcuts to get me by,” Rose says. “Fishing shallow, my eyes could see a shoreline. They’d see points, rocks and trees. All of that was right there in front of me. But once I started to ‘see’ these same things out in deeper water, where my only eyes are my electronics, the offshore bite started to make sense to me.”

Rose’s breakthrough came in October of 2007 at an FLW Series event at Pickwick Lake, where he plucked 60 pounds, 10 ounces of largemouth off offshore mussel beds for his first career win. He duplicated that success two years later with another offshore win on Pickwick at the All-American Series Championship.

“I was just barely scratching the surface with this offshore thing when I won at Pickwick in 2007,” Rose says. “I had just entered into being committed to the offshore bite and I won! I thought to myself ‘Just imagine what might be possible if I ever get this’ It’s really hard to win a tournament fishing shallow, but I learned that you can really separate yourself if you’re successful offshore. My career has changed because of it.”