Sunday July 11th marked the 3rd of 5 events on the Big Bass Bonanza circuit this season. The tournament was held on Green Lake near Spicer and drew 34 teams. This number was a little lower than I expected but Green Lake has been extremely tough this year and I think that may have kept a few teams from showing up. Despite threats of thunderstorms and wind the fishing conditions were very nice for the day but true to it's nature this year the fishing was extremely tough. Even the teams who ended up finishing well reported a tough bite. The winning bag went to Nick and Paul with an 8 fish limit for 22.15 lbs. 2nd place went to my dad and I with 8 fish for 21.95 lbs. 3rd went to the team of Moore and Moore with 20.96 lbs and they also had the big bass of the day with a 5.12 lb largemouth. I do not have official results so these are all from memory but I believe they are correct.
Like the other top finishers we also had a tough day overall. Our morning started off well but in the last 4 hours of the day we were only able to cull 1 time. We basically had a two pronged approach to this event after our practice period was over. We had found some good fish shallow in milfoil beds and also deep on humps.
We started the morning running various milfoil beds that we had located in practice and over the past several years. Our primary lure was a texas rigged tube that we threw around the edges and also right into the thick stuff. This pattern allowed us to fill our limit by about 9 am. That limit was mostly just small largemouth but also included 3 bass in the 3 lb or better range.
After fishing our best areas the action seemed to slow for us up shallow so we decided to head out to deep water in search of a few big smallies. We had gotten bit on several humps in the 20-30 foot depth range in practice and felt like this would be a good compliment to our shallow water pattern. Our first two stops out deep paid off nicely with 4 smallies in the 2 1/2 - 2 3/4 lb range on drop-shot rigged finesse worms. We continued to run this pattern in several more locations but the action was completely dead in all the other areas we tried. Since the deep water bite wasn't working for us anymore we headed back shallow but that was also very slow for the rest of the afternoon. I was able to upgrade with another 3 lb largemouth from the milfoil at about 1 pm but that was the only cull we made and one of the few fish we caught in the last 4 hours of the tournament.
Overall I'm pretty pleased with our performance in this tournament. Coming so close to a win but not quite getting there was pretty heartbreaking but that's how it goes. I really feel with the lake fishing as tough as it was that I should have been able to win the event but it wasn't meant to be. It really would have been nice to have a better afternoon or at least caught 1 more good fish to put us over the top but I don't think I would change anything about how we fished. It just didn't happen for us that day.
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