Big Bass Bonanza - Clearwater Lake

Sunday was the 4th and final event of the regular season on the Big Bass Bonanza circuit. 32 teams showed up to fish Clearwater Lake and most were able to weigh in their 8 fish limits. The fishing for most however was extremely tough as the bigger fish seemed to disappear. The weights were extremely low with just a little over 18 lbs taking 1st place. My dad and I weighed a disappointing 13.94 lbs for our 8 fish which put us in 15th place for the day. Coming into the day we were in 2nd place for the team of the year standings with a good shot to take over the top spot but with our poor showing we slipped one spot into a tie for 3rd. It's a little bit tough to take knowing that we had such a good chance at team of the year but I'm not going to get too down about it because I would still consider it to be a good season overall on the BBB trail. With our 3rd place in the standings we qualified for the Tournament of Champions which will be held on Lake Osakis in early September. I haven't fished Osakis very much and its been at least 6 years if not longer since I have been there so it will be interesting to see what we can figure out for the TOC. I enjoy going to new waters so it should be fun even though the lake doesn't have the best reputation.

This is the part of the blog where I talk about our fishing for the day but this time there isn't going to be much to tell. We started in an adjacent lake where we found 2 areas that were holding quality fish. They were both weedline areas and the fish were biting right away. We had our 8 fish in the boat in just about an hour using watermelon Brush Hogs and Lake Fork Tackle Trick Worms. After that our day was pretty much done. For the rest of the day I think we caught 5 more keepers with a couple that helped us upgrade by maybe half a pound. We kept rotating through areas where we had found them in practice or where we had caught them in the past but nothing seemed to work. One thing I found really strange was our complete inability to get a bite on a jig. In practice they were eating it pretty good but on tournament day the only jig bite I had was a northern. For whatever reason the fish just were not doing the same thing they were on our practice days. Obviously that means you have to adjust and we did but we just were not able to figure it out well enough on Sunday.

My next tournament will be the B.A.S.S. Northern Divisional on Bays De Noc in Michigan which will be held Aug 12-14. I qualified for the tournament by finishing 2nd in last years State Tournament of Champions. Unfortunately this means I will be missing 3 league nights and the West Central Bassmasters Summer Classic on Green Lake Aug 15th. Obviously the Divisional is a much more important tournament so I don't mind at all but it is going to make things very interesting at the end of the year for our leagues. I'm not sure what kind of internet access I will have out there so there may not be any updates for awhile. If I can get on a computer out there I will try to post updates on how it's going. Otherwise I'll do my full report when I get back home in a few weeks.