Lakeland, Florida pro catches 19 bass totaling 56-5 in final day Championship Round to earn top prize of $150,000

LEESBURG, Fla. (Feb. 16, 2025) – Across a decorated 17-year career that includes a REDCREST victory, one of the few accomplishments that had eluded Bobby Lane was a national-tour win in his home state of Florida. He’d come close – in fact, the last time the Bass Pro Tour visited the Harris Chain of Lakes, Lane finished second to Ott DeFoe – but had yet to lift a trophy in his home state.

Midway through the Championship Round at the Major League Fishing (MLF) Bass Pro Tour Suzuki Marine Stage 2 Presented by YETI at the Harris Chain of Lakes, it looked like Lane would have to keep waiting.

Matt Becker and Mark Davis shot out of the starting blocks, both amassing more than 30 pounds in the first period. Lane, meanwhile, started on the opposite end of Lake Apopka from where he’d caught most of his fish due to the strong south wind and struggled to gain traction. Halfway through Period 2, he’d tallied just 17 pounds, 6 ounces and trailed Davis by more than 20 pounds – and as the wind continued to increase in intensity, presenting baits and generating bites became more difficult by the minute.

But while the action slowed for everyone else, Lane used his Sunshine State savvy to steadily stack weight onto his total. He boated six bass in an hour, which included a 5-8 and a 4-9, to pull within one scorable bass of Davis’ lead at the end of the second period. He took over the top spot on SCORETRACKER® for the first time all tournament 30 minutes into the final frame. Finally, a flurry of five fish totaling 16-10 brought his total to 56-5 and sealed the long-awaited win – and $150,000 prize that comes with it – for the Lakeland native.

“I’ve been close before,” Lane said of winning in Florida. “I finished second here last time to Ott DeFoe, and to finally seal the deal on one in the home state – in a big, national tournament, not just a team event or something like that, but to get a big tournament – means the world to me.”

Prior to the start of practice, much of the dock talk centered on a recent fish kill that occurred on Lake Apopka. That news made Lane, like most of the field, hesitant to venture into the southernmost lake on the Harris Chain, especially since doing so meant a long run from takeoff each morning at Venetian Gardens.

Lane almost didn’t even check Apopka during his two days of practice. It wasn’t until the second day, when he was in nearby Lake Beauclair, that he figured he might as well lock through the Apopka canal and at least check it out.

The first place he stopped, he got six bites without lifting his Power-Poles. His next spot – the area where he ultimately caught most of his fish during competition – produced similar action.

“I make maybe 15, 20 flips, and I have five bites in a row, and two of them were big ones,” Lane said. “And I’m like, oh boy.”

Lane started Day 1 of competition in Lake Harris due to his late boat number, but after that, he was all-in on Apopka, which wound up producing six of the Top 10 finishers. He said the key to finding concentrations of bass was locating hard-bottom areas next to patches of emergent reeds. He thinks bass were staging on the hard bottom before spawning on the reeds.

“When you drop your Power-Poles, it sounds like you’re hitting rocks,” Lane said. “I think with all the grass being eradicated out of that lake, those fish have nowhere else to go but to swim to shore, and I think with the full moon we had during practice, all those fish that wanted to spawn on this moon were moving into that hard spot that I was on.”

While his area was full of fish, Lane said slow presentations were the only way to get them to bite. He locked an Abu Garcia Fantasista X 7-foot, 6-inch, heavy flipping stick in his hands with an Abu Garcia Premier REVO reel spooled with 50-pound-test Durabraid. Using a 5/0 Berkley Fusion19 hook and either a 5/16- or 3/8-ounce Epic Tungsten weight, he flipped a 6-inch Berkley PowerBait MaxScent The General to every reed in the area, slowly dragging the worm along the bottom.

Even for Lane, that could be painstaking. He joked that he was “tired of looking at the same 50 or 60-yard stretch of reeds.” But for an angler born and raised in Florida, wielding a flipping stick and slowly picking apart cover made for “a breath of fresh air.”

“Forward-facing sonar has its place, but it did not have its place on the Harris Chain of Lakes this week,” Lane said. “I live and breathe on that flipping stick. It usually gets me close sometimes. I’ve made a lot of money with it. But to actually seal the deal with it in my hands, there’s nothing sweeter.”

Far from the only accomplished flipper to find the bite in Apopka, Sunday’s Championship Round set up for an old-school slugfest. Lane’s first decision of the day almost took him out of the fight.

Seeing the wind buffeting his prime stretch, Lane decided to start the morning on the more protected southern end of the lake. On his third flip, he caught a 5-8, which reinforced his confidence in the area. But over the next 1 hour, 20 minutes, he would only get one more bite, a 2-pounder.

Watching his deficit to Becker and Davis balloon, Lane decided he had no choice but to battle the wind on the north end. The conditions made it almost impossible to present his bait accurately, but skillful boat positioning and patience allowed him to keep stacking up weight when no one else in the field could.

“You really had to get the boat positioned properly when you find the piece of cover you want to fish, drop your Power-Poles, and focus on keeping your bait on the bottom no matter what the wind was doing,” Lane explained. “That was the hardest task today was trying to keep that bait down there where the fish live.”

Lane committed to fighting the wind for the rest of the day, figuring the weather system would eventually blow through the area. With about an hour left before lines out, the gusts finally relented. Right on cue, he caught a 2-pounder, then a 2-6 (which Lane dove onto the front deck of his Phoenix to wrangle after it shook free of his hook). A 5-10, his biggest bass of the day, followed by a 4-8 five minutes later sealed his victory.

“I decided I was going to stay there until the wind shifted directions, which it did, and it just got better and better and better and better,” Lane said. “The minute that wind laid down, it was just perfect. Big one, big one, big one.”

Lane’s wife, Madeline; his daughter, Lexi; and his son-in-law, Kenny, cheered from shore as they watched him swing those final few fish into the boat. When time expired, he trolled over to them to exchange hugs, the perfect cap to the Florida win he’d been waiting for.

“That’s one thing you dream of is winning a huge tournament in your home state,” Lane said. “I’ve had a lot of close calls. They couldn’t stop me today.”

The top 10 pros at the Suzuki Marine Stage 2 Presented by YETI on the Harris Chain of Lakes finished:

1st:         Bobby Lane, Lakeland, Fla., 19 bass, 56-5, $150,000
2nd:        Mark Davis, Mount Ida, Ark., 14 bass, 38-13, $45,000
3rd:         Matt Becker, Ten Mile, Tenn., 15 bass, 36-15, $35,000
4th:         Terry Scroggins, San Mateo, Fla., 13 bass, 36-7, $30,000
5th:         Fletcher Shryock, Guntersville, Ala., 11 bass, 27-15, $25,000
6th:         Jacob Wheeler, Harrison, Tenn., eight bass, 23-9, $23,000
7th:         Jacob Wall, New Hope, Ala., seven bass, 16-10, $22,000
8th:         James Elam, Tulsa, Okla., five bass, 10-3, $21,000
9th:         Andy Morgan, Dayton, Tenn., four bass, 7-6, $20,500
10th:       Keith Poche, Pike Road, Ala., one bass, 2-2, $20,000

A complete list of results can be found at MajorLeagueFishing.com.

Overall there were 97 scorable bass weighing 256 pounds, 5 ounces caught by the final 10 pros on Sunday.

Jacob Wheeler of Harrison, Tennessee, won the Berkley Big Bass Award on Sunday – his third Big Bass Award of the week – with a 7-pound, 1-ounce largemouth that he caught in the third period. Berkley awards $1,000 to the angler who weighs the heaviest bass each day.

A new angler has taken the lead in the Fishing Clash Angler of the Year competition: pro Jacob Wall of New Hope, Alabama. The third-year Bass Pro Tour pro finished seventh on the Harris Chain after a third-place showing at Stage 1 on Lake Conroe.

Wall leads Jacob Wheeler, who has claimed the AOY crown in three of the past four years, by just one point. The two of them have a bit of cushion over Stage 1 winner Justin Cooper, who sits 10 points back of Wheeler.

The four-day tournament, hosted by Discover Lake County Florida , showcased 66 of the top professional anglers in the world, competing for a purse of $650,000, including a top payout of $150,000 and valuable Angler of the Year (AOY) points in hopes of qualifying for the General Tire Heavy Hitters all-star event and REDCREST 2026, the Bass Pro Tour championship.

Television coverage of the Suzuki Marine Stage 2 at the Harris Chain of Lakes Presented by YETI will premiere as a two-hour episode starting at 7 a.m. ET, on Saturday, Sept. 13 on Discovery, with the Championship Round premiering the following Saturday on Sept. 20. New MLF episodes premiere each Saturday morning on Discovery, with re-airings on Outdoor Channel.

The 2025 Bass Pro Tour features a field of 66 of the top professional anglers in the world, competing across seven regular-season tournaments around the country, for millions of dollars and valuable points to qualify for the annual Heavy Hitters all-star event and the REDCREST 2026 championship.

Proud sponsors of the 2025 MLF Bass Pro Tour include: 7Brew Coffee, Abu Garcia, Athletic Brewing, Bass Force, B&W Trailer Hitches, Bass Pro Shops, Berkley, BUBBA, E3 Sports Apparel, Fishing Clash, Grizzly, Lowrance, Mercury, MillerTech, Mossy Oak Fishing, NITRO, O’Reilly Auto Parts, Power-Pole, Rapala, Star brite, Suzuki Marine and Toyota.

For complete details and updated information on Major League Fishing and the Bass Pro Tour, visit MajorLeagueFishing.com. For regular updates, photos, tournament news and more, follow MLF’s social media outlets at Facebook , X, Instagram and  YouTube.

About Major League Fishing
Major League Fishing (MLF) is the world’s largest tournament-fishing organization, producing more than 250 events annually at some of the most prestigious fisheries in the world, while broadcasting to America’s living rooms on CBS, Discovery Channel, Outdoor Channel, CBS Sports Network, World Fishing Network and on demand on MyOutdoorTV (MOTV). Headquartered in Benton, Kentucky, the MLF roster of bass anglers includes the world’s top pros and more than 30,000 competitors in all 50 states and 20 countries. Since its founding in 2011, MLF has advanced the sport of competitive fishing through its premier television broadcasts and livestreams and is dedicated to improving the quality of life for bass through research, education, fisheries enhancement and fish care.