Chris Malone of Ironton, Ohio, brought a five-bass limit to the stage weighing 12-05 on Saturday to win the Toyota Series Championship on Lake Cumberland in Kentucky. Malone, with a three-day total of 41 pounds even, won by a 1-03 margin over 2nd-place angler Cameron Lineback of Mount Airy, N.C., who weighed 39-13. Malone held steady in 3rd place the first two days of competition before shooting to the top on Saturday to walk away with $235,000, including the lucrative $35,000 FLW Phoenix Bonus.
“I opened a boat shop in 2010 and took some time off from competitive fishing, but when I saw the championship was at Lake Cumberland again, I knew I needed to fish the Toyota Series,” said Malone. “I wanted to see if I could compete because I haven’t competed against these guys for a long time.
“I really thought Ryan Davidson was going to win this tournament – he’s the best winter fisherman I’ve ever fished with. I told him that if I actually won, I would pay his 2021 entry fees (to the Tackle Warehouse Pro Circuit). That $30,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to how I feel right now.
“I’m on a high you can’t come off of – I honestly wasn’t going to fish next year, but how do you not fish after you just won a quarter of a million dollars?”
Malone said he caught pretty much all of his fish this week on the main lake along river-channel swings.
“The fish are super-shallow, but they are on top of 25 to 40 foot of water in some of these places,” Malone said. “I’ve been catching them cranking and on a half-ounce Big Daddy Baits tail-spinner. After getting six or seven keepers, I picked up a big bull shad and tried to catch big ones for the last two hours. I used a G. Loomis IMX Pro rod with a Shimano Curado reel with 15-pound Seaguar InvizX line. I weighed in three on the RkCrawler and 12 on the spinner.
“I went for broke – I went to win,” said Malone.
Here are the final totals for the Top 10:
1. Chris Malone: 41-00
2. Cameron Lineback: 39-13
3. Drew Boggs: 37-04
4. Dakota Ebare: 35-11
5. Eric Olliverson: 34-15
6. Kurt Mitchell: 34-12
7. Michael Caruso: 32-00
8. Trent Palmer: 28-15
9. Hunter Eubanks: 28-07
10. Andrew Loberg: 28-04
