Big Bass Bonanza - Lake Ida

This past Sunday was the 3rd of 4 stops on the Big Bass Bonanza tournament circuit. Ida is a deep extremely clear lake that is known for huge numbers of bass. Catching fish on Ida is not a problem but what is difficult is finding the quality fish needed to win or do well in a tournament. Even though the average fish is well under 2 lbs it still takes around a 3 lb average to win and close to that to do well. After our practice I was just hoping to catch 16 lbs for our 8 fish and salvage a decent finish to keep us near the top in the team of the year standings. We ended up doing better than I expected and weighed a limit for 17.84 lbs which put us in 10th place out of 33 boats. Obviously this was by far our worst tournament of the year but I feel pretty good about it because it could have been a lot worse. I also feel we made good decisions on the water and fished a clean tournament to maximize the little we had going. The winners weighed 8 fish for 21.33 and 2nd place had 19.82 lbs. In the team of the year race we slipped from a 3 way tie for 1st to 2nd position but we are still in great position to make a charge at the team of the year. 1st place right now has 139 points but we are right behind with 136. There are also 2 teams with 135 points so the race is extremely tight.

Like I said earlier our practice was mediocre at best but we did have a few areas I thought we could catch 2 pounders on and maybe a few bigger than that. We started on an area where we caught our biggest fish in practice which wasn't even 3 lbs but there were also a few other decent fish around and if everything went right I felt like we could catch a limit of 2 pounders pretty quick and then try to figure out how to get a big bite the rest of the day. Of course that didn't happen even though we caught our limit in the first hour. The problem was the fish shrank and we didn't even have anything over 1 1/2 lbs let alone 2 lbs. After that hour it just seemed like the bigger fish weren't biting or had moved so we went to a few other areas to try to upgrade. We tried a few deep weedlines, shallow cabbage beds, reed beds and docks but only managed a few more small fish that helped by ounces not the pounds we needed.

By this point we had run through the 4 areas where we felt we had the best chance to do well and only had a small limit. With not much else to go to we headed back to our starting spot and hoped the fish had positioned better or were more willing to bite later in the morning. The spot really wasn't a spot but a long sharp breakline with sand on top and weeds growing right on the drop off. There were a few key areas along the drop off but really you could catch a fish anywhere along it. This time when we came back the eventual winners were sitting right on one of those little key spots. They were moving pretty slow and I know they are good fishermen so I knew something was going on and they were catching good fish. There was still plenty of area so we worked around and a few hundred yards north of them we finally started getting into some better fish. After working the area for a couple hours we had upgraded our bag to a little above the 16 lb range. All of those fish came on a watermelon Picasso jig with the small 2 1/2 inch Lake Fork Pig Claw trailer. The big key to the jig I feel was downsizing to lighter line and a smaller profile jig and trailer in the clear water. Usually if your looking for bigger fish you want to use bigger lures but in this case it was the exact opposite.

After the bite slowed in our primary area we had about an hour left in the day. The sun had started to come out so we decided to fish docks for the rest of the day. Dock fishing on Ida can be hit or miss but traditionally some of the biggest fish come from the docks and we have a few good stretches that we have relied on over the years. When we pulled in on our best docks there was already another boat there but they were far enough down that I was able to get the 10 docks I really wanted to fish. Almost immediately I caught one that went about 2 1/4 lbs and a few docks down I popped another that went 2 3/4 lbs. Both those fish were caught on a green pumpkin Strike King Bleeding Bait tube. Those were the last 2 fish we caught for the day but they were extremely important to our finish. The weights all the way down the board were very tight and without those 2 fish we would have finished much closer to the bottom of the pack than the 10th place we got.

The last stop on the Big Bass Bonanza trail is Clearwater Lake in early August. We fished it earlier in the year for one of our club state qualifier tournaments and didn't have a great day but I do like fishing on Clearwater. We have a fair amount of experience on the lake and even had a win on the Midwest Sportsman ciruit there a few years ago. I am definately not going to change the way I've been fishing just because of the points race. I go into every tournament with the goal to win and it will be no different for Clearwater. We will fish the way we feel is the best way to win the tournament based on our practice. Even if we wanted to fish conservatively it wouldn't make any sense because the points are so tight and the competition is so tough that if you stumble just a little bit theres a bunch of teams that will jump right past.