BFL
Tournament Standings -Day 3
Smith Mountain
NB

Report Summary
Total Number of Co-Angler: 6
Total Number of Fish Caught: 4
Number of Fish Weighed in Alive: 4
Percent Weighed in Alive: 100
Total Weight: 11-0

BFL
Tournament Standings - Day 3
Smith Mountain
BO

Report Summary
Total Number of Boaters: 6
Total Number of Fish Caught: 18
Number of Fish Weighed in Alive: 18
Percent Weighed-in Alive: 100

SMITH MOUNTAIN LAKE to Host Wal-Mart Bass Fishing League Regional Championship

MONETA, Va. (Sept. 13, 2006) - The $8.8 million Wal-Mart Bass Fishing League will visit Smith Mountain Lake near Moneta, Va., Oct. 19-21 for one of seven no-entry-fee Regional Championships. During the tournament, top Empire, North Carolina, Northeast and Piedmont division anglers will compete for a $60,000 prize package that includes a new Chevy truck and Ranger 519VX powered by Evinrude or Yamaha in the Boater Division and a $40,000 Ranger 519VX powered by Evinrude or Yamaha in the Co-angler Division.

Boaters and co-anglers who finish in the top six at the Smith Mountain Regional Championship will also advance to the $1 million no-entry-fee 2007 All-American championship presented by Chevy where they will fish for as much as $140,000 in the Boater Division and $70,000 in the Co-angler Division. The winning boater and co-angler at the All-American will also advance to the no-entry-fee $2 million Forrest Wood Cup in Hot Springs , Ark. , Aug. 2-5, 2007 . This event, featuring a top award of $1 million, is the most lucrative tournament in all of competitive bass fishing.

Overall, 40 boaters and 40 co-anglers qualified from the Empire, North Carolina , Northeast and Piedmont divisions for a total field of 160 boats on Smith Mountain Lake . The anglers qualified for the Regional Championship through a series of four one-day tournaments and a two-day Super Tournament in each of their respective divisions.

Bridgewater Marina located at 16400 Booker T. Washington Street in Moneta will host daily takeoffs at 7 a.m. Bridgewater Marina will also host Thursday and Friday's weigh-ins beginning at 3 p.m. Saturday's weigh-in featuring the top six boaters and six co-anglers will be held at the Wal-Mart located at 1126 East Lynchburg-Salem Turnpike in Bedford, Va., beginning at 4 p.m. The winners will be determined by the heaviest total catch from all three days of competition.

In BFL competition, boaters supply the boat and compete from the front deck against other boaters. Co-anglers compete from the back deck against other co-anglers.

As the nation's leading provider of affordable, close-to-home weekend tournaments, the BFL is widely credited with opening competitive bass fishing to the masses. It also serves as a steppingstone for anglers who wish to advance to the Stren Series and ultimately the Wal-Mart FLW Tour - bass fishing's most lucrative tournament series. Former BFL anglers who have become fishing superstars on the Wal-Mart FLW Tour include Kellogg's pro Clark Wendlandt, Ranger pro Tommy Biffle and four-time FLW Tour champion David Fritts.

Named after the legendary founder of Ranger Boats, Forrest L. Wood, FLW Outdoors administers the Wal-Mart FLW Tour, Wal-Mart FLW Series, Stren Series, Wal-Mart Bass Fishing League, Wal-Mart Texas Tournament Trail presented by Abu Garcia, Stratos Owners' Tournament Trail, Wal-Mart FLW Walleye Tour, Wal-Mart FLW Walleye League, Wal-Mart FLW Kingfish Tour, Wal-Mart FLW Kingfish Series, Wal-Mart FLW Redfish Series and Wal-Mart FLW Striper Series. These circuits offer combined purses exceeding $37.9 million through 249 events in 2006.

For more information about FLW Outdoors and its tournaments, visit FLWOutdoors.com or call (270) 252-1000.

Wal-Mart and many of America 's largest and most respected companies support FLW Outdoors and its tournament trails. Wal-Mart signed on as an FLW Outdoors sponsor in 1997 and today is the world's leading supporter of tournament fishing. For more information about Wal-Mart, visit Wal-Mart.com.

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Editors: Visit the FLW Outdoors Media Center at http://mc.flwoutdoors.com for additional information and photos.

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To be removed from this list, please visit http://mc.flwoutdoors.com/mc/mediaRemove.cfm.

SML BASSTOBERFEST 2006 SCHEDULE:

Located at the corner of Moneta Road (Rte 122) and Rucker Road (Rte 806), near Downtown Moneta at Smith Mountain Lake - just 3 ½ miles north of Hales Ford Bridge in Bedford County.

Musical Entertainment:
1:00pm – 2:00pm Floyd Ward School of Dance
2:00pm – 5:00pm Stacy Hobbs, harp guitarist

Other Activities: Face Painting, Inflatable Bouncers, Clown, and Caricatures
1:00pm –5:00pm

Pumpkin Decorating / Carving Contest Submissions
1:00pm – 4:00pm

Pumpkin Contest Judging and Ballots Counted
4:00pm – 5:00pm

Pumpkin Contest Winners Announced
5:00pm

Also, great food and drinks throughout the entire Basstoberfest!

FLW Outdoors History

On June 24, 1997, Irwin L. Jacobs, the CEO of Genmar Holdings, addressed professional bass anglers for the first time. It was the eve of the Wal-Mart FLW Tour’s Forrest Wood Open, being held on Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota, where a record $1 million was going to be paid to bass anglers, and the winner was taking home an unprecedented $200,000 in cash.
For bass pros, it was their first opportunity to get a look at the man who, in his short time at FLW Outdoors, had already persuaded Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, to sponsor professional bass fishing – a monumental accomplishment in and of itself.
Jacobs told the crowd the $200,000 top prize they were about to fish for and the subsequent national television exposure of the Forrest Wood Open was only a fraction of what was to come from FLW Outdoors. He was true to his word.
As plans for the 1998 Wal-Mart FLW Tour season were unveiled that evening, anglers were awed by the sums of money offered and the innovative ways FLW Outdoors planned to cover professional bass fishing in the following year. In addition to $150,000 going to the Wal-Mart Open winner, and $200,000 going to the Forrest Wood Open winner, it was announced that the 1998 FLW Tour season would culminate with a Tour Championship where the winner would pocket $250,000.
Now, almost 10 years later, FLW Outdoors is an extremely busy organization. In 2006, the company is offering purses totaling $35 million to anglers across 244 events over 10 fishing circuits covering four different species.

Meeting a Market Demand
In 1996, FLW Outdoors recognized a growing demand among enthusiastic bass anglers for well-organized bass tournaments. The company’s goal was to grow the sport and increase its participation base by supplying these anglers with plenty of opportunities to compete in professionally conducted bass tournaments.
It is the same fundamental goal Mike Whitaker had back in 1979 when he started Operation Bass, the parent company to FLW Outdoors. Whitaker wanted to create a weekend-oriented bass tournament trail geared toward anglers who could not take time off work to compete.
What Jacobs sought to do was build on Whitaker’s foundation. Jacobs envisioned a complete hierarchy of tournament circuits that would accommodate everyone from the full-time touring professional to the beginner. The key to the hierarchy would be a series of qualification pathways within the system that allowed anglers to advance to the next level of competition and correspondingly bigger payouts.
After assuming Whitaker’s foundation in 1996, Jacobs’ first major contribution was to build the top tier – the prestigious FLW Tour – complete with nationally televised tournament coverage and unprecedented payouts. Then in 1998 he added the successful Stren Series, known at that time as the EverStart Series, which bridged the gap between the weekend-level Wal-Mart Bass Fishing League and the FLW Tour. In 2000, FLW Outdoors opened their doors to professional walleye anglers, with the Wal-Mart FLW Walleye Tour (formerly known as the Wal-Mart RCL Walleye Tour) and followed that up with a qualifying tour for that trail, known as the Wal-Mart FLW Walleye League.
At the end of the 2004 season, FLW Outdoors broke new ground with the introduction of two new saltwater trails – the Wal-Mart FLW Kingfish Tour and the Wal-Mart FLW Redfish Series, both of which enjoyed highly successful seasons and allowed saltwater competitors to compete for prizes never before possible.
The FLW Kingfish Tour fields filled completely within a few hours of open registration. To meet the unbelievable demand for professional kingfishing tournaments, the Wal-Mart FLW Kingfish Series, a qualifying path for the FLW Kingfish Tour, was announced at the end of the 2005 season.
More opportunity arose for anglers who chase the most popular tournament species – black bass – in 2005 with the announcement of the Wal-Mart FLW Series, a companion professional bass-fishing circuit to the FLW Tour. The brave, lucrative new series was introduced to meet changing demands in the professional bass-fishing marketplace. By noon on the first day of registration, fields for the FLW Series were nearly full.
Besides introducing lucrative new tournament trails, FLW Outdoors has also made some ingenious moves in its tournament structure. One was to adopt a “pro-am” format for every bass-fishing event, from the BFL to the FLW Tour, as well as in the walleye events.
After going to a pro-am format, FLW Outdoors recognized that “amateurs” had much more value than that of a back-deck watchdog. These anglers were the future participants of the sport and many were professional caliber in their own right.
As a result, FLW Outdoors coined the term “co-angler” to describe the angler in the back of the boat and opted to give co-anglers greater recognition and opportunity by allowing them to gather points, earn championship berths and qualify for pro fields from the back deck.

Unprecedented Payouts
Over the last decade, the FLW Tour has set the standard in professional fishing payouts on several fronts. For starters, the FLW Tour scratched “cash and merchandise” payouts and went straight to cash. Starting in 1997, $100,000 was paid for first place in all regular-season events, making the $100,000 top-prize payout a standard in professional fishing.
The FLW Tour was the first fishing tour to pay 190 percent of the entry fees taken in and it was the first to pay all the way down to 75th place.
The FLW Tour was first to reach the $150,000, $200,000 and $250,000 first-place cash-award marks in professional bass fishing.
As FLW Outdoors eyed the $500,000 mark for the winner of a single tournament, anglers expressed concern that tour payouts had grown too top heavy. FLW Outdoors listened and made another payout announcement in 2003 that once again made history.
The announcement was that the winner of the FLW Tour Forrest L. Wood Championship would receive $500,000. And for those wanting a fuller payout down the field, the 2003 championship guaranteed every angler at least $12,200 just for qualifying for the event.
For the 2004 season, FLW Outdoors again deepened the payouts down the field. The Wal-Mart Open and the Forrest Wood Open both paid $10,000 down through 50th place, meaning one out of every four pros in these events would take home $10,000.
That particular payout increase met with such a resounding response from anglers that in 2005, the Wal-Mart FLW Tour guaranteed $10,000 through 50th place in all of its regular-season events. Additionally, the last-place payout in the Forrest L. Wood Championship is now $15,000.
Today, the height, depth and breadth of FLW Tour payouts are still unmatched in tournament bass fishing.

Increased Exposure
Starting in 1997, FLW Outdoors forged new ground in televising bass tournaments when the FLW Tour became the first fishing tour to feature live dialogue between show hosts and anglers via cell phone during the tournaments.
In 1998, FLW Outdoors broadcast its first live weigh-in to Wal-Mart stores nationwide via Wal-Mart’s in-store television network
In 1999, FLW Outdoors and FOX made history by broadcasting the first live fishing tournament, the Ranger M1 Millennium Tournament, following an afternoon NFL broadcast.
FLW Outdoors has also been successful in getting bass fishing into other forms of mainstream media. In terms of newspaper coverage, the FLW Tour has been featured in USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times to name a few of the larger papers.
In mainstream television, CNN has featured the FLW Tour’s phenomenal growth, along with ABC’s “World News Tonight.”
Prominent publications such as Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Business Week and Forbes have all featured articles on the FLW Tour as well.
In house, FLW Outdoors produces FLW Outdoors Magazine and the FLWOutdoors.com Web site. The Web site itself has set a few benchmarks in bass-fishing coverage. In addition to daily coverage of FLW Outdoors tournaments, the site offers an up-to-the-minute “Angler Profile” that compiles results, winnings and photos of individual FLW Outdoors participants and teams.
In 2003, FLWOutdoors.com introduced FLW Live, featuring live streaming audio, video and leaderboards from every FLW Tour stop plus other selected events.
Perhaps the proudest moment for FLW Outdoors’ push for increased exposure of professional fishing came recently when the company signed a television deal with FSN (Fox Sports Net) for 51 weeks of television programming surrounding FLW Outdoors tournaments.

Corporate America Meets Professional Fishing
New levels of exposure, record payouts and increased opportunity in professional fishing are all derivatives of the amount of corporate sponsorship FLW Outdoors has attracted to the sport. After stepping into the sport, Jacobs realized that the endemic companies alone – the boat, engine and tackle companies – could not supply the amount of money needed to do what FLW Outdoors wanted to do in the business. Therefore, going outside the fishing market was crucial in making it work.
But nonendemic giants that make everyday consumer products like batteries, film, soft drinks, potato chips, candy bars and cereal are a tough sell. Many higher profile sports are constantly competing for their advertising dollar.
When corporate America finally cracked the door to hear Jacobs’ earnest pitch about the potential value of the fishing market, he was soon winning them over.
One of those primary innovations for those sponsors was the Family Fun Zone, a carnival-like sponsor exposition held in conjunction with FLW Tour weigh-ins. The Family Fun Zone, which is free and open to the public, allows sponsors to hand out samples and educate consumers about their products.
Fishing pros stay on hand for the Fun Zone to talk fishing with fans and sign autographs. Many of the pros themselves are also sponsored by FLW Tour sponsors, another example of FLW Outdoors’ effort to bring greater visibility to their supporters.
In 1999, FLW Outdoors brought a critical innovation to the competitive fishing marketplace through the use of wrapped boats, which turned bass boats into mobile billboards on the water and the nation’s highways. Now corporate-wrapped boats have caught on in a big way in other circuits as a viable marketing tool.
The impact FLW Outdoors has had on professional fishing is undeniable. The ripple effect of its increased participation, payouts and exposure has been felt throughout the fishing and outdoors marketplace. Consider that over the last 10 years the FLW Tour alone has paid back more than $46 million dollars to anglers.
Like most every year before it since 1996, 2005 was one of epic change and growth for FLW Outdoors. Each new tournament season promises to provide more opportunity to anglers and bring coverage of fishing heroes to fans of angling of all sorts and all species across the country.