Topwater and Jig Top on Ozark
by Kyle Wood
FLW
PRESS RELEASE
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| New locations and topwaters key for Lawyer win. (Photo: FLW) |
Forgetting the past can be a hard thing for a bass fisherman to do. But for Jeremy Lawyer, it proved to be the right decision.
When Lawyer left the dock this morning for the final day of the Costa FLW Series event on Lake of the Ozarks presented by Evinrude, he was in fourth place and just 2 pounds, 8 ounces off the lead. Being that the top-10 weights were so close, the general consensus was that whoever caught the biggest limit on the final day would likely be crowned champion.
Lawyer hauled in a rare limit on Saturday worth 13-12 – also the heaviest of the day – and it proved to be more than enough to earn him his first FLW Series win with a total of 46-3 and $88,500 in winnings.
Fishing off instinct instead of history was the biggest key for the Sarcoxie, Mo., pro this week, and really for the entire season.
“Earlier in the year before the first Central Division event on Table Rock I erased all my waypoints there and had a good finish,” Lawyer says. “I just got a new Ranger before coming [to Lake of the Ozarks] and I didn’t transfer any of my waypoints over. You can get in trouble sometimes when you try to fish history and I just wanted to go fish what looks good and what’s right for the conditions.
“I’ve fished a lot of tournaments up here and have a lot of history and you can get stuck in a comfort zone, so I figured without my waypoints I wouldn’t have the pressure to try and fish that stuff. Sure, you remember good stretches of bank, but I wanted to be able to fish free. Really, fishing the (FLW) Tour has helped build my confidence to just fish because most of the lakes we go to I don’t have any history on.”
It all started this week when Lawyer ran to a stretch he hadn’t practiced on in the Gravois Arm and started catching fish flipping a prototype JaKKed shaky head (it will be his signature series jig) with a Zoom Magnum Trick Worm. He would then go on to cull up to 14-7 thanks to a River2Sea Whopper Plopper.
