Big Bass Bonanza - Lake Minnewaska

Well the Big Bass Bonanza on Lake Minnewaska was another disappointing tournament for us this year. We just can't seem to get it going yet but hopefully with the warmer weather we are having that will turn around soon. We ended up I believe in 23rd place out of 49 boats with 8 fish for 20.53 lbs. The winning weight was around 24 1/2 lbs. Based on our practice 20 lbs was a realistic day for us but if everything went perfect we could have been close to 24 lbs but obviously that didn't happen. We just didn't get any big bites or even solid bites at all. Our biggest fish was only a little over 3 lbs and all the rest were just 2 1/2 pounders. 7 of our fish were largemouths and 1 was a smallie. We just couldn't make any of our usual big smallmouth spots work for us.

Like I said in my practice report we found one area that seemed to have a group of quality fish so we started there. It was a weedline in about 10 feet of water, but the funny part was it wasn't good weeds at all, just stringy crap but the fish seemed to be using it. That was practice though and in the tournament we didn't catch anything. Next we tried another similar spot with no luck. After an hour we had no fish out deeper so we went to a reed patch and caught 6 fish in less than an hour on Strike King Flippin tubes and Wild Thangs. After that we pretty much bounced around to different areas the rest of the day. We probably hit 25 different spots and ended up catching a keeper fish here and there. Our spots were a wide range of things. We fished reeds, docks, shallow rock and gravel flats, shallow weed beds and deeper weed beds out to about 12 feet. All of our weigh fish came on various Strike King tube baits and Picasso Jigs tipped with Lake Fork Pig Claws.

Our next Big Bass Bonanza tournament is in 2 weeks on Green Lake. Hopefully we can turn it around since it is our home lake. We are going to be out there a lot too since our final West Central Bassmasters state qualifier tournament is there this coming weekend. We will probably be on Green Lake pretty much every day the next week and a half. Even though I know a ton of spots out there it can't hurt to fish it more. There is just so much to learn out there and that makes it fun.