WAL-MART OPEN : Growth shows on FLW Tour
Posted on Thursday, May 15, 2008
It’s homecoming week for the Wal-Mart / FLW Tour as 400 bass anglers from 37 states and five other nations prepare for the 12 th Wal-Mart Open at Beaver Lake.
The four-day tournament begins today with the championship round Sunday. Weighins are at 3 p.m. today and Friday at Prairie Creek Marina on Beaver Lake near Rogers, and at 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at the John Q. Hammons Center in Rogers.
The Wal-Mart Open is the fourth stop on the FLW Tour, but it ranks second only to the Forrest Wood Cup in importance. For starters, the $ 200, 000 first-place prize is double that of the other FLW open events. Its proximity to Wal-Mart’s corporate headquarters in Bentonville and tour namesake Forrest L. Wood’s hometown of Flippin also make it the tour’s homecoming event.
“Next to our championship, this is the biggest event we host every year,” said Dave Washburn, vice president of FLW Outdoors. “Rogers is home to our No. 1 sponsor, and several of our other sponsors have offices in Rogers. Our sponsors pull out all the stops for this event because it’s like a homecoming, and it’s the standard by which all other qualifying events are judged in our book.
“ The whole state of Arkansas is fishing friendly, and the fans always come out and support it.” With a total purse of $ 1. 5 million, the Beaver Lake Open is also one of the most lucrative tournaments in bass fishing. It will tie the 2005 FLW Championship as the richest tournament ever held in Arkansas and will be second only to the $ 2 million Forrest Wood Cup, which will be Aug. 2-5 in Columbia, S. C.
“It’s just grown exponentially from the first year of the FLW Tour in 1996 until now,” Washburn said.
In 1996, the total payout for the entire tour was close to $ 870, 000.
“This one event is almost twice as big as the entire tour was in 1996,” Washburn said. “Every year we build on the previous year, so it just gets bigger and bigger.” In 2005 and 2006, the Wal-Mart Open was in March and April, respectively, which meant anglers primarily targeted spawning bass. The spawn will largely be finished by today, so anglers will probably use post-spawn tactics. High water also will give Beaver Lake a much different appearance than last year. Jay Yelas of Corvallis, Ore., who finished second at the 2007 Wal-Mart Open, said high water and cool temperatures could help make the tournament more interesting.
“The high water should shake things up a little bit,” Yelas said. “We go there every year, so it’s kind of nice to have different conditions. Otherwise, everybody ends up fishing the same spots year after year. The high water will create a unique playing field because the fish won’t be in the same locations they normally are.” Yelas said he thinks anglers will need 22 to 26 pounds, slightly more than last year, to make the cut to the final two days of competition.
“A mid-May tournament on Beaver Lake with high water will make for a different tournament than we’ve had in the past, so I’m looking forward to that,” Yelas said. “The fishing should be a little bit better than it normally is. Usually when you have really high water, the fish are more accessible. They come up out of the deep into the trees and flooded cover.
“ They’re a little bit easier to catch than when the lake is low, so the fishing might a little better than average” A full field of 200 anglers and 200 co-anglers will compete today and Friday. After Friday’s round, the top 10 anglers from both divisions will advance to Saturday’s round, where they will start with zero weight. The co-angler with the heaviest catch Saturday will win that division. The pros will fish Saturday and Sunday, and the one with the heaviest two-day weight will win.
The winner of the 200-angler pro division will win a cash prize of $ 200, 000. The winner of the coangler division will win $ 40, 000 cash.
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