Virginia’s Chase Clarke kicked off his third year of fishing the Bassmaster Opens by winning the initial 2025 event at Georgia’s Clarks Hill Reservoir. The victory gave him a long step toward his goal of becoming a Bassmaster Elite Series angler and earned him an invitation to the 2026 Bassmaster Classic.
“Qualifying for the Classic seems surreal,” Clarke said. “It’s a dream come true. I’m thankful for it every single day.”
Clarke relied on offshore tactics combined with his prespawn knowledge to sack his fish at Clarks Hill. While growing up in Virginia Beach, Va., he was schooled on shallow water techniques by his father Bobby.
Clarke’s home overlooked 85-acre Lake Joyce, which served as his bass fishing elementary school. Before he was old enough to fish by himself, his father would take him out on the lake in the family’s bass boat.
“Starting in fourth or fifth grade, I was allowed to fish alone from a paddle boat as long as I stayed in sight of our house,” Clarke said. “I would work on casting, hooksets, flipping and other techniques my dad taught me. I wanted to get good enough to fish tournaments with him.”
At age 10 his father introduced him to “Wednesday nighters.” Two years later, they began fishing a weekend series together.
“We won our first tournament in March that year and got $750 apiece,” Clarke said. “For a kid in sixth grade, that was awesome.”
When his grandpa gave him a Tracker boat powered by a 50 horsepower outboard, Clarke was allowed to fish Lake Joyce with the rig, provided he idled and did not put the boat on pad. It gave him an opportunity to experiment with techniques he had read about or watched on YouTube.
“That’s how I learned how to throw a jerkbait,” Clarke said. “I had watched a Skeet Reese jerkbait video on YouTube. It was 30 degrees and sleeting outside, but I couldn’t wait to try it.”
He snatched the exact same jerkbait seen in the video from his father’s tacklebox and set forth on Lake Joyce in the Tracker. Just as Reese had demonstrated in the video, Clarke worked the jerkbait with a snap, snap, pause, snap cadence.
“I caught four bass that weighed 18 pounds,” Clarke said. “I’ll never forget that.”
During his high school years, Clarke and his father competed in several local bass trails, including Fishers of Men, Angler’s Choice and Bojangles. When his father wasn’t available, he would team up with his father’s fishing buddy Charles Goff.
They often fished the Pasquotank River, which Clarke regards as his home water. It is also the site of an Elite Series tournament this April. Many other events took place on the Potomac River and Kerr, Smith Mountain and Gaston lakes.
“I learned as much as I could about fishing shallow and seasonal patterns from prespawn, spawn, postspawn and summertime,” Clarke said. “But I was never really taught how to fish deep, simply because of the fisheries we have in Virginia. This left a big hole for me to fill.”
He would begin to fill that hole after graduating from high school and joining the collegiate Bass Fishing Team at Auburn University. He was soon ledge fishing with drop-shot rigs and other baits.
He and his partner Peyton McCord won the Alabama College Championship in May of 2022, his senior year at Auburn. They caught their bass fishing offshore ledges on Lake Eufaula with drop-shot rigs and flutter spoons.
He graduated from Auburn’s Harbert College of Business with nearly a 4.0 GPA. The following year he took on all nine Bassmaster Elite Qualifiers and introduced himself to forward-facing sonar.
He claims that mastering this technology is a work in progress, along with getting more experience at fishing offshore. If he can’t figure out how to catch bass offshore during practice, he resorts to his shallow-water roots.
“I don’t have a technique that I feel is my specialty anymore,” Clarke said. “I do whatever I need to do, depending on the body of water and the weather.”
Clarke’s title sponsor is SiteMix LLC, a concrete company based out of Atlanta, Ga., and Dadeville, Ala. His other sponsors include Care-A-Lot Pet Supply, Dobyns Rods, Big Bite Baits, Greenfish Tackle, Bill Lewis, Corner Consulting, Wiley X Sunglasses, Powerhouse Lithium, Mercury Marine, Bass Cat Boats, NBT Marine, Mancon LLC and the National MS Society.
