Jacob Wheeler scored his ninth Bass Pro Tour event win on Kentucky Lake with 46 scorable bass weighing 110 pounds, 13 ounces. Photo by Phoenix Moore
By Mitchell Forde
BASS PRO TOUR, Press Release
CALVERT CITY, Ky. — At each of the past two Bass Pro Tour regular-season events, Jacob Wheeler has finished in second place, one bite short of the win. He fell 2-3 shy of Drew Gill on Lake Murray, then lost a heartbreaker to Jake Lawrence on Chickamauga and Nickajack, when Lawrence caught a 5-9 in the final seconds before lines out.
At Lowrance Stage 5 Presented by Mercury on Kentucky Lake, Wheeler made sure no one else even got a chance to steal the trophy.
Wheeler rallied after a slow morning and stacked up 110 pounds, 13 ounces on 46 scorable bass during Sunday’s Championship Round. He turned what looked like it would be another slugfest with Lawrence, the home-lake favorite, into a rout, topping Lawrence by 32-7.
The win is Wheeler’s first of 2025 and ninth overall on the Bass Pro Tour, adding to his tour-best trophy count. This one carried special significance, not just because he was able to flip the script and get revenge on Lawrence, but because he grew up traveling to Kentucky Lake to compete in tournaments alongside his father, Curtis, who passed away from cancer in April.
“I just felt like he was with me all week,” Wheeler said through tears shortly after the victory became official. “It’s the first tournament that I’ve fished on a lake that we fished together, and this one had a lot of meaning to it. Obviously, he was a big part of my life, and I wouldn’t be here without him. I just wanted to win it for him.”
Here’s how the Top 10 pros finished the Championship Round:
Jacob Wheeler – 110-13 (46)
Jake Lawrence – 78-6 (30)
Brent Ehrler – 69-8 (32)
Jacob Wall – 62-13 (27)
John Hunter – 62-10 (26)
Adrian Avena – 53-11 (22)
Cole Floyd – 51-11 (18)
Spencer Shuffield – 44-11 (16)
Andy Montgomery – 35-15 (16)
Michael Neal – 29-10 (12)
On paper, Stage 5 will go down looking like vintage Wheeler domination. He blasted more than 95 pounds during the first half of the first day of qualifying, then spent the rest of the day idling and scouting for new schools. He only fished for about a third of Day 2 but caught enough to win the Qualifying Round, earning himself a direct berth to the Championship Round. Sunday, while a north wind slowed the bite for everyone else, he cruised past the 100-pound mark.
But the Championship Round didn’t start as planned for Wheeler. Anticipating a barnburner with Lawrence and several other ledge luminaries among the final-day field, he started in the area where he’d caught his weight on Day 1. An hour in, he had just 12-1 – despite using his lone period with forward-facing sonar during the opening frame. Meanwhile, Lawrence steadily stacked bass on SCORETRACKER®, putting up 41-15 in the first two hours.
Even though he knew his deficit would continue to grow and the clock was ticking on his forward-facing sonar period, Wheeler decided to make about a 30-minute run south.
“I hadn’t been out during the weekend, and I realized very quickly there was a lot of local pressure and a lot of other anglers on the water today,” Wheeler said. “I didn’t know for sure how the fish would react to the pressure. So, I started there, thinking maybe I could really catch them, and come to find out it was definitely not the deal.”
Wheeler thinks there were more fish schooled up on Kentucky Lake’s famous river-channel ledges on the northern end of the lake, and he couldn’t bring himself to run past the area Sunday morning then potentially double back later in the day. However, he believes the schools he found toward the southern end of the competition boundaries weren’t getting as much pressure, which made the bass more willing to bite.
“There wasn’t as many schools in that area, but they were places that I felt like not very many local anglers and a lot of our tournament anglers were fishing, so it was something I could manage,” Wheeler explained.
That he had a backup plan at his disposal was a testament to Wheeler’s early-tournament strategy. While he initially wavered over whether to win the Qualifying Round and the automatic trip to the Championship Round that came with it or use the Knockout Round to do some additional idling, he ended up achieving both objectives because he was able to catch fish so quickly during the first two days. He hit a total of 13 schools Sunday, a few of which he found during the Qualifying Round.
“I found two of my best places in the third period of the final qualifying day,” he said. “After I had already won and basically no one was trying to run me down, I found two more places that were instrumental in winning this tournament.”
Wheeler goes old-school with football jig
By the time he made the trek south and found a cooperative school, ending a 1-hour, 6-minute drought, Wheeler trailed Lawrence by more than 26 pounds. A flurry of seven scorable bass totaling 18 pounds in 22 minutes cut his deficit to a more manageable 14-5 at the first period break.
At that point, Wheeler at least knew where he would spend the rest of the day. And while Lawrence, who also utilized forward-facing sonar during the first period, struggled to maintain his pace once he turned his transducer off, Wheeler steadily chipped away.
He caught a 3-3 in the first minute of the second period, then added four more scorables. Perhaps his most important flurry came an hour into the second stanza, when he boated four straight largemouth over 3 pounds to take the lead.
All of those fish ate a 3/4-ounce football jig with a Rapala CrushCity Cleanup Craw as the trailer. Wheeler, who had 18 rods on his front deck to start the day, caught bass on the full gamut of offshore staples during the event. But prior to the Championship Round, he hadn’t spent much time throwing a football jig. It wound up accounting for 30 of his 46 bass, and he caught more weight during each of his two periods without forward-facing sonar than he did in Period 1.
“There’s just something about a heavier football jig with a Cleanup Craw,” Wheeler said. “The Cleanup Craw having a really high-frequency kick, it’s not drawn out, it looks real natural. I caught fish dragging it, and I caught fish snapping it. You always have it on the deck. It’s a classic. Baits like that just don’t go away. Bass still like them.”
Wheeler credited his two recent close losses for keeping him focused on catching one fish at a time rather than the final result. While Lawrence blitzed from spot to spot throughout the afternoon, looking for a magic school that never materialized, Wheeler stayed steady. He turned a lead of a little more than 10 pounds at the start of the third period into a winning margin of more than 30. Finally, with about 10 minutes left, he let himself start to soak in the moment.
“Obviously Jake beat me close to my house – it wasn’t my home lake, by any means, at Nickajack, but I was like, man, it would be nice to get him back a little bit,” Wheeler said. “It was fun to be able to compete with him and battle it out on Kentucky.”
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