Inside Walker’s big-bass bite on Lake Guntersville

Across his three days on Guntersville, Walker landed 11 bass of 5 pounds or more.

B&W Trailer Hitches Stage 1 Presented by Mercury delivered a thrilling start to the 2026 Bass Pro Tour season. Legendary Lake Guntersville served up plenty of big bass. 

Eighty-four bass over 5 pounds hit SCORETRACKER®), anglers caught them in a variety of different ways and viewers got to watch dramatic races for the top spot at the end of both the Qualifying Round and Championship Round.

With his third win in as many BPT seasons, 23-year-old Drew Gill continued to build his case as one of the best pros in the world. But that was far from the only interesting storyline that emerged across four days on Big G. Here are a few other noteworthy nuggets that deserve some shine.

Walker figured out the Guntersville giants

Although Jacob Walker fell just one scorable bite short of the win, he came away from his first regular-season Bass Pro Tour event feeling like “that might have been a once-in-a-lifetime deal.”

Walker, who beat the buzzer at the end of Day 2 to win the Qualifying Round and nearly did it again on Championship Sunday, boating a 6-pound, 9-ounce tank in the final minute to pull within 1-5 of Gill, found an incredible big-fish bite on Guntersville. During the Championship Round, he not only caught the Berkley Big Bass with a 7-4; he accounted for the four biggest bass caught by the 10-angler field on the day. His five biggest bass combined to weigh 31-14.

Across his three days on Guntersville, Walker landed 11 bass of 5 pounds or more – five on Day 1 (when he also had the Berkley Big Bass with a 7-10) and six on Day 4. He caught five bass over 6 pounds and three over 7. That rest of the field combined to catch just 10 6-pounders and five 7-pounders.

Walker, who knows Guntersville well, entered the event confident he would be around fish, but he admitted he was surprised to catch such quality so consistently.

“Generally, that size is just harder to catch,” the Alabama resident said. “They’re smarter, they’re more educated, there’s not as many of them. So, I didn’t know that I was going to be able to catch enough, but it worked. It just worked out perfectly.”

Almost as unique as the number of giants he landed was how Walker caught them. All but one of his 5-plus-pounders ate a fire craw bladed jig in shallow water – 4 feet or less.

Walker thinks the sub-freezing temperatures each morning of the event deterred most anglers from venturing quite as shallow as he did. The areas he exploited had a prime combination of cover for big bass to ambush prey.

“It’s not in the textbook of bass fishing to go fish 4 foot and less with 20-degree nights,” he said. “There’s a little more to it than just the fish getting up shallow. It was a good mix of hard bottom – anywhere that has that good hard bottom like that generally grows really healthy grass. And so, I had good, clean eelgrass, good hydrilla, and then obviously the pad stems. But the deal is not so much the pad stems; it’s more of the hard bottom that is around those pad stems. So, it’s more of that change from hard bottom into good eelgrass into good hydrilla, and getting to hit, in one cast, three different changes.”

Walker first figured out that pattern during practice for a 2023 Toyota Series event on Guntersville. However, a storm that canceled Day 1 of that event also pushed his fish out of the shallows, illustrating just how rare it is for that kind of a bite to last multiple days this time of year. Each day, Walker wasn’t sure if his fish would still be there, but the bite actually got more predictable as he identified the most productive stretches. His best area was in North Sauty Creek (a popular spot for several pros), but he was able to expand the pattern to a few other areas farther up the lake, as well.

“You would think the cooling temps would have been a big factor, but it didn’t affect them,” he said. “I will say, I think the water dropped during the event. It dropped a couple inches each day. And as that water was falling, I thought that pattern was going to transition farther out. But I think all it did was concentrate them into tighter areas. Like, by the end of the tournament, I had a 100-yard radius where I knew they were going to be.”

Walker earned $45,000 for his runner-up finish plus another $2,000 in Berkley Big Bass cash. The cherry on top: Winning the Qualifying Round freed him up to compete in a local team tournament on nearby Smith Lake on Saturday, where he and partner Michael McLaurin finished 19th and pocketed another $1,500. Not a bad start to his rookie season.

Walker gave some of the credit for his magical event to the lake itself, which proved yet again why it’s considered one of the best tournament fisheries in the country.

“That tournament was a true testament to the quality that Lake Guntersville is,” he said. “Even with the 365 days a year pressure that place gets, it still outperforms any other lake in the country.”

Traditional tactics kept pace with FFS

Entering this event, many believed that forward-facing sonar would play an outsized role in determining the top anglers even though pros were limited to using it for one period each day, as was the case at last year’s season-opener on Lake Conroe. And while it obviously keyed Gill’s victory – he caught more than 200 total pounds of bass using forward-facing sonar across the event – the field as a whole found just about as much success without forward-facing sonar as they did with it.

On the week, 32.9% of the scorable bass were caught by anglers using forward-facing sonar, accounting for 33.8% of the total weight. Given that most anglers utilized the technology for a third of their time on the water, that indicates catch rates weren’t drastically different when the lock boxes were on.

Whether due to the unusually mild winter so far in Alabama or the fact that fish simply live shallow year-round on Guntersville, plenty of anglers found as much or more success winding lipless crankbaits, shallow-running plugs and bladed jigs around submerged vegetation as they did wielding jighead minnows.

“I think everybody felt that forward-facing sonar would be the dominant pattern, especially since this was a wintertime tournament,” third-place finisher Jacob Wheeler said. “When we started practice, I didn’t see the bait and bass floating around as I anticipated. It seemed like you could wind around and catch fish up shallow, so that’s what I committed to, and the majority of my fish were on the lipless for fish that had already started their prespawn deal.”

Other notes:
While forward-facing sonar may not have dominated the event as a whole, a few anglers did rely on it to produce the majority of their weight. The most surprising of the bunch was Keith Carson. The Florida native is best known for his sight-fishing and shallow-water prowess (although he did win on the Detroit River using forward-facing sonar in 2024), but 75.9% of his weight came during the forward-facing sonar periods on Guntersville. That was the highest percentage of any angler who made the Championship Round. Carson also put together the best period of any angler this week when he used his Lowrance ActiveTarget and a jighead minnow to blast 65-8 during the first frame on Day 3.

No angler who has worked his way through the qualification process to the Bass Pro Tour has arrived with more hype than Banks Shaw, and he delivered in his first event. Despite his boat catching fire early in the Championship Round, Shaw finished fifth. He’s now made the Top 10 in each of his first eight tour-level events – easily the most ever to start an angler’s career.

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