MECKLENBURG COUNTY, Va. — Often, tournaments are won by anglers fishing within their comfort zone. That wasn’t necessarily the case for the King University duo of Trey Marco and Jake Rowlands at the Strike King Bassmaster College Series presented by Bass Pro Shops at Buggs Island.
Using two baits they’ve hardly thrown, Marco and Rowlands won their first College Series event with a two-day total weighing 38 pounds, 9 ounces. The Pennsylvania natives opened the tournament in a tie for eighth place with a limit weighing 17-1 before securing a tournament-best 21-8 on the final day.
“It has been a while since I’ve won a bigger tournament,” Marco said. “This has been a long time coming. We put a lot of hard work into this, and it feels good to be rewarded for it.”
While neither of them had been to Buggs Island as boaters, Marco fished an event on the massive Roanoke River reservoir as a co-angler a few years prior.
“I fished the lake twice as a co-angler four years ago, and that was the year I really started bass fishing,” Marco said. “It feels good to come back here and see all of the progress I’ve made over the past few years.”
Emmanuel University’s Will Wester and Jackson Thomas finished second with a two-day mark of 36-3 while Day 1 leaders Easton Drennon and Chase McCarter from Carson-Newman University fell to third with a total of 34-14.
Marco, a sophomore, and the freshman Rowlands teamed up at the start of the school year but were disappointed with their results during the fall season. The duo worked hard to improve over the winter and spring, with preparation being an important piece of the puzzle. They spent several days on Buggs Island before the off-limits period scanning offshore areas looking for brushpiles.
When tournament week rolled around, they discovered that brush would not be the key piece of cover and shifted their focus to stumps.
“We thought shallow brushpiles would be good for postspawners,” Rowlands said. “We ended up finding that the brushpiles were not what they were on, it was stumps. But luckily when you found brushpiles, there were also stumps around.”
The majority of their productive stumps were in 12 feet of water or less, but on the final day they moved deeper and targeted smaller stumps. Most of these targets had two or three bass holding to them, and at times Marco said they had to weed through the smaller fish to get to the quality largemouth.
“It was hard to find an area by yourself. Our biggest key was finding an area that we had to ourselves. We didn’t see another boat the entire tournament. We pretty much made a circle around a three-mile area. We had 50 to 70 stumps marked. It seemed like the bites came in flurries.”
To trigger their bites, the duo threw a ¾-ounce bucktail jig as well as a Megabass Kanata Jerkbait, neither of which have been used much by Rowlands and Marco in the past. In fact, Rowlands received the jerkbait as a Christmas gift this past December and bought another one after Brandon Palaniuk won the Champion Power Equipment Bassmaster Elite at Lake Okeechobee in February. There was only one bucktail jig in the boat, and the hook was admittedly a little rusty.
“I really feel like no one was throwing them and these fish haven’t seen them,” Rowland said.
After not catching a single keeper to start Day 1 around a shad spawn, Marco and Rowland headed straight to their primary area on the final day. The duo picked up 11 pounds by 11 a.m., but within a 15-minute flurry, the duo upgraded to over 19 pounds.
“It was one of those things that just seemed meant to be,” Marco said. “The bite you normally don’t get, for whatever reason we got. It was a very short period of time, and we expanded on it a little bit.”
At around 1 p.m., the duo landed their final 4-pounder to put them over the 20-pound mark. While Marco felt good about their chances to win when they landed that bass, Rowlands thought they needed another kicker bite.
“Trey was saying the whole time that we had a shot at the win if we got to 21,” Rowlands said. “And I was saying we needed more. He was right.”
With the win, Marco and Rowlands qualified for their first Bassmaster College National Championship, which will be held just south of King University on Cherokee Lake in July.
Wester and Thomas utilized a similar gameplan to catch their 18-9 and 17-10 limits. They anchored their final day bag with a 5-4 largemouth. The duo dedicated their top finish to head coach Pam Martin-Wells, who passed away in April from cancer.
“It felt great being able to do this for her,” Wester said.
The week started with a blown motor, but in the process of trolling back to the ramp, the Emmanuel duo discovered the bass in the area were hovering around brushpiles.
With a new boat brought up from Georgia, they expanded on their pattern before making the transition to stumps in 6 to 8 feet of water, although they did catch a quality keeper off a stump in 30 feet of water. A ⅜-ounce brown and purple jig produced the majority of their stump bites while a 5/16-ounce Buckeye Lures G-Stroll jighead paired with a Strike King Z-Too minnow was better around the brush, especially if the bass were floating above the brush.
“Our better bites came around midday with the jig,” Wester, a sophomore, said.
With a limit of 10 pounds to start the day, Wester and Thomas slowly culled up throughout the day. Their kicker bite came around mid-morning.
“About 10 o’clock we had 13 pounds, and I leaned into that 5-4, which helped big time,” Thomas, a freshman, said. “We had our weight by 1 and we kept catching 2-pounders from then on.”
Wester and Thomas split Big Bass of the Tournament honors with the Erskine College duo of Rylan Green and Luke McGuffin, who also landed a 5-4 on the final day of competition.
The Top 20 teams qualified for the aforementioned Strike King Bassmaster College National Championship presented by Bass Pro Shops at Cherokee Lake scheduled for July 10-12. All teams earned points towards the Lunkers Trail points race. The Lunkers Trail will conclude at Chickamauga Lake May 30-31.
Mecklenburg County, Virginia, hosted the tournament.