All Star Series Patterns Offer Variety

GARLAND, Texas – Part of the fun of watching professional anglers in tournaments is not only seeing their execution and focus, but also learning a bit about how they fish.

The top 12 pros in the final day of the Bass Pro Shops PAA All Star Series on Lake Ray Hubbard gave a pretty good tutorial on several techniques.

One was the shad spawn in marinas. Pitching a white jig about halfway into boat slips and swimming it out past the dock was spot-on for foraging largemouth. Another was playing the wind to their advantage, either in protected areas or out in the teeth of the Texas bluster. Crankbaits and jerkbaits commanded the most attention, although a few used soft plastics to their advantage.

Here are the patterns for the 6th-12th place finishers:

Wolak adjusted well
6th, 47.93 pounds

Yamaha pro Dave Wolak of North Carolina knew the combination of a tailing bass spawn and ongoing shad spawn was deadly, so he used moving baits to target fish in both of those groups.

Wolak’s primary bait was a Jackal Muscle Deep 10+ in SS Shad color, which he threw around rocks. Wind aided his bite by helping to group up the shad.

“My biggest adjustment was to fish a little deeper as the day went on,” he said. “The key was to go to the wind, not from it. Most of the big ones came on that Muscle Deep in the deeper water.”

He left a few out there, too.

“A lot of them,” he said. “I’ll have to put in another order for some crankbaits.”

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