Top-10 finishes are Jacob Wheeler's stock-in-trade, but his eighth-place result at the Major League Fishing Bass Pro Tour's Stage 5 on Beaver Lake, Arkansas, was anything but routine — earned through tough conditions and a heavy personal load.
The finish marked the reigning Fishing Clash Angler of the Year's 43rd top-10 in the BPT. "That's our 43rd top-10 in the BPT. That's insane," the recently crowned REDCREST champion said. "That was stressful, though."
His week was complicated early when rivals crowded into the docks and flooded grass he had planned to rotate through. "I got in an area, I had a rotation yesterday — worked really well — and it sort of got interrupted today," Wheeler said. He leaned on a chatterbait with a Freeloader trailer and a Crush City "Janitor" fished high in the column, but the shad spawn he needed never materialised. Borrowing a term from fellow pro AJ Allen Jones, he called it the "sad spawn." "The shad are not spawning," Wheeler said. "It's the absolute worst conditions you could ask for for a shad spawn."
He had pegged the winning weight high. "Sixty pounds is probably what it takes to win," he said. "Forty-five to sixty is what I'm thinking." That bar belonged to champion Cole Floyd, who Wheeler was quick to credit. "Cole Floyd never even turned his forward-facing sonar on — caught 44 pounds," he said. "He's going to be tough."
Through it all, his mind was elsewhere. Wheeler revealed his wife was in hospital. "My wife, she's in the hospital right now," he told viewers. "They're trying to figure out — she has a couple of masses in her leg. She's in a lot of pain." Driving overnight to be with her ahead of a biopsy, he asked fans to "keep us in your thoughts and prayers." That he still ground out a top-10 — "I just maximised everything that I had," he said — spoke to why he remains one of the sport's most relentless competitors.