OSAGE BEACH, Mo. – In early fall on Lake of the Ozarks – and really just about anywhere in the country – bass are fairly unpredictable, mostly spread out and wildly inconsistent from day to day. For his part, Tackle Warehouse pro Jared Lintner has combatted inconsistent bass with tremendous consistency in weighing in 35 pounds, 9 ounces over the first two days at the Toyota Division Presented by Phoenix Boats Plains Division finale for a slim 1-pound lead over Andy Newcomb entering Championship Saturday.

Lintner found himself in third after posting 16-3 on Day 1, but while several other pros in the Top 10 failed the eclipse their Day 1 weight, the Covington, Georgia, pro came to the scales with 19-6 on Friday, surpassing Day 1 leader Brock Reinkemeyer’s 19-5 for biggest bag of the event so far.

Lintner doesn’t necessarily have a magic bullet driving his success this week – though gunning has certainly been part of it. He’s been all over Lake of the Ozarks through two days of competition and a few days of practice.

“I’m stopping probably 40 to 50 times throughout the day,” he said of his run-and-gun approach. “Run, fish for five to 10 minutes, pick up the trolling motor, run, fish for another five to 10 minutes… I’m just going and covering a lot of water – tons of it.”

That isn’t to say Lintner is hitting a lot of low-percentage areas. Rather, he’s rapidly running a very specific dock-related pattern about which he’s keeping pretty mum. That pattern involves specific targets that are sometimes several miles apart in the midlake region of the sprawling fishery.

“A big, big key for me has been the mapping on my Garmin ECHOMAP Ultra 2,” he said. “I’m looking for, basically, specific docks; and a lot of this water I’ve run the past two days is stuff I’ve never fished in my life. The way the mapping is, it shows the style of dock I’m looking for and I’ll run 5 miles to go hit one dock based on the way it looks on the Garmin map. That’s been a real key thing.”

While others may be struggling with simply getting bit during the fall-transition funk, Lintner has certainly been around fish (he said he caught nearly 40 fish in total on Day 2, though only seven were keepers). He was able to weed out some lower-percentage areas during practice in order to help dial in the pattern that’s amounted to a couple extremely solid days so far.

“I didn’t have a lot of keeper bites, but I had some good size,” he said of his practice period. “It was a lot of dead water and then you’d run into a little area where you’d get two or three keeper bites, and then you’d fish another three hours and catch a few little ones and then you get to another spot and get a couple keeper bites. That told me that it’s really specific on where [the bass] want to be.”

To catch them, Lintner has been doing a little of everything, though he chose to not give a lot of detail about his productive baits with one more day left to fish.

“The Daiwa Tatula 7-foot, 6-inch flipping stick has been my bread and butter,” he said. “And I’m throwing a lot of reaction baits.”

Reaction baits are likely to be the deal for Lintner on Saturday. Day 1 brought lots of sunshine that may have tucked some bass up under docks and allowed him to pick off some good ones fishing slow. On Friday, cloud cover blanketed Lake of the Ozarks and seemed to have turned off his flipping bite.

“Today I think I had one flipping bite and it was the smallest bass I caught all day,” he said. “If the sun comes out, they reposition and you can fish for them a little different. I did learn that because I spent a lot of time today fishing, flipping and stuff like that for no results.”

With forecasts calling for more overcast conditions on Saturday, reaction baits may again be the ticket to a tournament-winning bag. The other key: remaining positive and committed to the plan amidst tough fishing conditions.

“It’s hard because it was 11 or 12 o’clock before I even had a keeper today,” Lintner said. “I was like, ‘man am I even going to catch one today?’”

Still, these running, gunning, on-your-toes-at-all-times events are what Lintner loves. If it’s hard for him, it’s probably hard for everyone, and that’s where his decades of experience can tip the scales.

As for Saturday, Lintner’s confident in what he’s found and his ability to replicate results to finish the job based on forecasted weather conditions.

“It’s pretty much going to be the same as it was today, and I obviously caught some fish today,” he said. “Maybe it’ll be similar tomorrow.”

If it is – and Lintner’s pattern holds up – he’s going to be tough to beat.

Top 10 pros:

1. Jared Lintner – 35-9 (10)
2. Andy Newcomb – 34-9 (10)
3. Brock Reinkemeyer – 32-2 (10)
4. Casey Scanlon – 30-3 (10)
5. Tyler Lubbat – 29-11 (10)
6. Aaron Johnson – 29-9 (10)
7. Jake Lawrence – 29-4 (10)
8. Dennis Berhorst – 18-6 (10)
9. Jonathan Pimentel – 26-15 (10)
10. James Dill – 26-14 (10)