South Carolina's Paul Marks has put a second Bassmaster Elite Series trophy on his shelf, and the through line on both his career wins is now impossible to ignore: he wins where blueback herring set the rules. In a sit-down breakdown for Zoom's Top Tackle channel, Marks walked viewers through the exact bait, hook, rod and game plan that closed out his Lake Murray title.
"Just wrapped up the Bassmaster Elite Lake Murray. Got the win, got another blue trophy on a herring lake," Marks said. "It's a dream come true times two, I guess."
Of the 20 keepers Marks brought across the scales over four days, 18 came on a single bait - a Zoom Super Fluke in a new colour the company is launching as Chartreuse Herring. Marks described it as a hybrid that reads differently in sun and cloud.
"It kind of works in cloudy and sunny conditions," he said.
The rig was deliberate. A 5/0 Gamakatsu offset worm hook gave him both the bulk to drive a hookset on big casts and the weight to keep the soft-jerk swimming fast without rolling out of the column.
"I use the 5/0 because it's a little bit heavier. It's a big hook, so I can work the fluke a little bit faster, and it doesn't come up out of the water," Marks said. "It also is nano-coated and super strong, super sharp hook. I mean, I could have used the same one the whole week and it still would have been just as sharp."
The rod was a 7-foot medium-heavy Lew's Custom Lite, sized so the tip would still load on long casts but the backbone could pull a thick 5/0 through cartilage on the hookset.
"Using this rod, I could feel like I could throw it way further, and when one ate it, I was hooking them," Marks said.
Retrieve cadence changed by the hour, Marks said.
"Every day I had to switch it up throughout the day on how I worked it in," he said. "Sometimes it was as fast as I could do it without it blowing out, and then sometimes it was just working it real slow and just a subtle little swim up through there."
The final day delivered the kind of mid-morning judgement call that decides Elite titles. After his two best starting spots gave him just a single three-pound keeper, Marks reached past the spinning rod.
"Made a game-time decision and picked up a baitcaster with a crankbait on it," he said. "Pulled up, caught two over five, and really kick-started my day. And then ran to one of my starting spots and threw up there and caught a six on a fluke, and I knew it might be a wrap then, but I wanted to cull my last one that wasn't quite 4 pounds. And it worked out, obviously. What a crazy week."
For anglers eyeing the blueback herring fisheries for the rest of May and into June, Chartreuse Herring just became a confirmed major-tournament colour. Fished on a beefed-up 5/0 worm hook, on a 15-pound fluorocarbon leader, on a medium-heavy graphite stick with a quality tip, off long points and humps in water from a foot deep to 20 feet, with the cadence dictated by sun angle and the wind chop on the day.
It is also a quiet statement of what Marks has become as a specialist. Two big-stage wins. Both on herring lakes. Both on a soft-jerk fished a way that very few other anglers on tour are willing to commit to for four straight days.