With winter’s chill still in their bones, the bass in South Carolina’s Lake Hartwell had little reason to bite at this year’s Bassmaster Classic. But Texas pro Alton Jones gave them just enough motivation to grind out a win with a three-day weight of 49 pounds, 7 ounces.

Fishing in his 11th Classic, the 44-year-old Jones worked a complicated pattern that depended as much on location as lures. Still, it was three baits — a Booyah Pigskin Jig, a Booyah AJig and a Cotton Cordell C.C. Spoon — that paved his road to victory.

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The Pigskin Jig consists of a football head with a skirt of both round rubber and a sparse gathering of Bio-flex silicone. The rubber strands are longer, while the silicone adds color to the bait. With a 3⁄4-ounce jighead, Jones’ chief colors were brown and purple. He also used a green pumpkin.

The Booyah AJig features a flat-bottomed head and contains a mixture of round rubber and silicone. Jones employed the 1⁄2-ounce model.
To attract bass to his jig, Jones added a 31⁄2-inch Yum Chunk trailer in black and blue.

“The trailer slowed the jig’s fall,” he says. “If I used a 1-ounce or something that really rocked it down through the water column, I didn’t get bit either. It needed to just flutter around with not much action — just very subtle and slow. You’d feel your bait bump a piece of cover, and after you came past the cover and moved it another inch or two, your bite would come.”

Jones also used a 3⁄4-ounce silver C.C. Spoon as well as a hand-pointed model that he made to copy colors known to be local favorites. This spoon had a white stripe on one edge, chartreuse down the middle and blue down the other side.

"It's pretty ugly," Jones says. “I’m not an artist. Besides, I think when something is dancing around down there in 30 feet of water, it doesn’t
really matter.”

Like a successful real-estate agent, Jones repeated the seller’s adage “location, location, location” after trudging to the lead during the second day of competition. For a while on the final day of the event, it looked as if Jones’ valuable property had been sold out from under him because he struggled to catch a fish in the first few hours of a chilly, overcast day. But then the Texan put on his seller’s smile and started landing the fish his key locations were providing.

His key spots were the inside edges of deep timber in about 30 feet of water.

“Specifically, I wanted that inside edge right in the bottom of the little drains that lead into the spawn areas,” Jones says. “The fish were lying down in the bottom of the ditches in the creek. When these fish are thinking about spawning, I’ve found they head to the little drains that are full of timber and that they move to the very shallowest edge of that timber.”

Jones would find the shallowest edge of that timber and then go a little bit shallower.

“A lot of times you might find a stump or one or two extra trees that were isolated off the edge,” he says. “These trees had to be located down at the bottom of the ditches. Normally, you fish on the top side of the ditch or where it breaks off. I was literally putting my boat in the channel and making long parallel casts, bringing the bait right down the middle of the channel.”

When Jones felt his Pigskin Jig bump over a piece of wood, that’s when he would get ready, because that’s when every one of his strikes occurred.
Jones gave credit to his side-imaging sonar, a Humminbird 1100 series, for helping him find the specific treetop spots.

“I could not have found enough places to win this tournament without my side-imaging,” he says. “It was absolutely critical.”
On his sonar, Jones set the scan to 150 feet from either side of the boat. Equipped with a wide screen, it provided him with incredible detail.

“Instead of having to just aimlessly idle back and forth through a cove hoping to run over something significant on a traditional sonar, in one pass I’d know whether a cove has potential or not,” Jones says. “It allowed me to have multiple productive fishing areas.”

In effect, the side-imaging sonar gave Jones the ability to read water without actually fishing it.

“I don’t have to fish the entire ditch to find the isolated tree that’s 20 yards off the tree line,” he says. “I can see that tree on my side imaging, move the cursor over to it, mark a waypoint and go hit that tree on my first cast. And I don’t have to waste time fishing the whole area. It’s an efficiency scenario.”

Lake Hartwell was showing plenty of shoreline during the Classic. Suffering through the second year of a severe drought, the red soil appeared like a wide picture frame around the diminished water. Many docks were so far from the water’s edge that they looked totally misplaced. All of the 50 Classic contenders were pushed much farther from the banks than normal. Still, Jones found the structure he wanted far from the new shoreline.

“They are all over the lake,” he says of the submerged treetops. “Almost the whole lake has the same type of thing. What I found was that the flatter pockets with well-defined ditches were the best ones. I think those flatter pockets are going to warm up a little bit quicker, and the fish are going to go there to spawn first.”

Jones wasn’t so much looking at the really steep pockets. Instead, he wanted those that were almost flat up to the bank and gradually slopping from there.

“Some of the ditches I was fishing were not an abrupt drop,” he says. “Some of them may have only had a 2-foot drop, but it was abrupt. The best ones also were narrow. If I could find a ditch that was maybe 10 feet wide from one side to the other, that was perfect. If I found that with some trees, I knew I was going to catch them.”

Jones also found that line weight was an important element in his win. Fishing snaggy structure, he had to base his selection on its ability to pull fish from the snarl of treetops as well as it not being a detriment to bites. Using the C.C. Spoon, Jones employed 17-pound test Silver Thread fluorocarbon. When fishing the jigs, he switched to 14-pound Silver Thread fluorocarbon.

“One of the problems with the spoon is that you lose a lot of fish on it,” Jones says. “My philosophy on that is the fish don’t get line shy because the spoon’s in deep water jumping around real fast. When I hook one, I just want to winch them in and throw them in the boat as fast as I can. The longer he stays in the water, the better chance he is going to get loose.”

Jones had another reason to use the 14-pound Silver Thread while jigging.

“That 14-pound fluorocarbon seemed to be the perfect mix of being able to get bites and still have the chance of succeeding and pulling them through the cover,” Jones says. “Fluorocarbons aren’t all created equal. You need one that has three qualities — strength, low visibility and castability. The Silver Thread is a good mix of all three of those.”

The rod Jones used for the C.C. Spoon was a 6-foot-6-inch, medium-heavy Kistler Magnesium TS with an Ardent XS 1000 reel. For jig fishing, he used a Kistler 7-foot medium-heavy rod with the same Ardent XS 1000 reel.

Though the catches for most anglers shrunk over the three days of the tournament, Jones’ tree-edge pattern held up throughout the contest.
“I had to run to some new water on the third day,” he says. “I caught two fish off a place I hadn’t visited all week. I only caught five (on Sunday) so I really needed those additional places.”

While Jones missed several fish on the final day of the Classic, he hooked five and landed five, so execution was definitely important.
“When I idled into the weigh-in, I thought I had an outside chance at best at winning the Classic,” he says. “I never dreamed it would be a victory with as poorly as I’d done compared to the previous days. It was just a grind.”



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