$35,000 for 4th place aint bad

Austin Swindle had bookend 17-pound bags on the first and third days and cashed a $35,000 check for his efforts. His pattern evolved from practice and then changed again as the event progressed.

“In practice, I wanted to find a way to ‘Scope them because I thought that’d be the way to win, but I never got on anything,” he said. “The only way I could catch them was on a jerkbait on the grass edges. That was good the first day but changed the second day, and I started running down the bank with a buzzbait and throwing a jig at a few rockpiles I had and laydowns I came across while working down the bank.”

Fishing the downriver section of Wheeler, Swindle began the event catching his fish on a translucent shad pattern Megabass Vision 110 jerkbait. Once that bite fizzled, he used a 3/8-ounce Boogerman Buzzbait with a white Zoom Z-Craw instead of the skirt and utilized a 3/8-ounce Backwoods Custom jig in green pumpkin blue with a twin-tail grub as the trailer.