Keith Williams of Conway displays 9-pound catch.

If you follow the major bass fishing competitions either casually or fervently, you know that Sunday, June 12, was a red letter day for Arkansas anglers.

Two of them posted notable doubleheader victories on the international bass fishing circuits.

Keith Williams of Conway captured the Walmart FLW Tour event in Kentucky and a $125,000 first prize. Kevin Short of Mayflower won the BASS Elite Series competition on the Mississippi River at Fort Madison, Iowa, and brought home $100,000.

There is more.

Billy McCaghren of Mayflower came in third in the BASS event behind Short and won $20,000. Two other Arkansans were behind him in the top 12. Stephen Browning of Hot Springs was fifth and won $14,000. Mike McClelland of Bella Vista was 12th and won $10,500.

Larry Nixon of Bee Branch was third in the FLW tournament behind Williams and won $40,000. Also in the FLW top 10 were three other Arkansans Mark Rose of Marion, fourth, winning $30,000; Travis Fox of Springdale, fifth, winning $20,000; and Ron Shuffield of Bismarck, seventh, winning $18,000.

All this came on the same day that a golfer, Bryce Molder of Conway, was winning $492,000 for a second place finish on the PGA Tour.

Coming into the BASS event, Short knew he had a chance to do well. Fishing on a river was something that he has done since childhood, growing up near the Arkansas River. This tournament, Short keyed on two key backwater sloughs near each other. One was his primary area, where he spent the majority of each day and the other was right around the corner. He slipped in there for about an hour to catch a few key fish.

In those two sloughs he alternated between a variety of lures including spinner bait, crank bait and two different pitching baits. The key wasn’t so much one particular lure, but giving the fish different looks when fishing the same cover over and over again.

“Most of the people around me were locked in on one technique,” Short told Rob Russow of ESPN Outdoors. “The fish were seeing the same thing flipped in front of their face over and over again and so I wanted to keep throwing something different at them.”

Short went “old school” on the bass, using a Strike King Premier Elite spinner bait that he modified to have both two copper Colorado blades and a green and white rubber skirt.

The best times Short found for throwing the spinner bait was under cloudy skies that periodically rolled through the Fort Madison area. When it was slick calm or sunny, Short would mix in the crank bait, a W.E.C. E1 crank bait in a chartreuse classic color.

For flipping, Short used a Zoom Speed Craw in a Junebug color and also a Zoom Baby Brush Hog. The key with those baits was flipping the Speed Craw and actually casting the Baby Brush Hog — staying back and making presentations to the large laydowns that were present in the slough.

Also important to his victory were his signature pink colored sunglasses with an amber lens.

“The water cleared up a little and it was important to see the logs,” Short said. “Those logs were eight to 10 inches below the surface, and the key was hitting the spots where the logs crossed. You wouldn’t think that sunglasses are important in dirty water, but for me, they were.”

Short climbed from sixth place to first on the final day of the BASS tournament on the Mississippi River. He had five bass totaling 11 pounds, 13 ounces the last day. For the four-day tournament, Short had 43 pounds, 4 ounces.

Short said after the last weigh-in, “This week was like going back in time to when I first started tournament fishing. I just feel comfortable on river systems. There are certain anglers who know and understand rivers and will always be able to perform well there, and I consider myself one of those people.”

The victory put Short in 10th place in BASS Angler of the year standings and in strong contention for a berth in the 2010 Bassmaster Classic.

In the FLW tournament, Williams said his first fish of the day, a 9-pound, 1-ounce largemouth, was the fish that sealed the victory on Kentucky and Barley lakes. He had 10 bass that totaled 42 pounds the final day.

“I knew right then I had a chance to win if I could just settle down and catch a decent limit,” Williams said. “I’m not really sure what time I caught it. After I caught it, everything was just a blur. I made myself get off the trolling motor and slow way down because I was shaking. I knew I was going to mess up if I started fishing too fast.”

Williams said he focused on a grassy area with shell spots and rocky spots in a road bed that he said runs through Kentucky Lake for five or six miles. Williams said he alternated between a 10 1/2-inch plum-colored Zoom Ole Monster worm, a 3/4-ounce Strike King football-head jig and a Zoom Brush Hog fished on 20-pound Berkley Trilene Fluorocarbon line. His Texas-rigged worm rig consisted of a 5/16-ounce Tru-Tungsten weight and a 5/0 hook.

“Seventy percent of my fish came on the initial fall after I’d make a long cast,” Williams said. “They were really boat shy.”

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Joe Mosby is the retired news editor of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and Arkansas’ best known outdoor writer. His work is distributed by the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. He can be reached by e-mail at jhmosby@cyberback.com.