West Central Bass League - Norway Lake

Thursday August 27th was also the final night for the bass league this year. The format was exactly the same as on Wednesday but on this night we had the full 10 team field fishing. It was a great night for fishing but the fish just didn't really cooperate for the most part. Ron & Joe again figured it out the best and went back to back in winning both Classics this year. On Thursday they weighed 8.49 lbs. 2nd place went to John & Jacob with 6.05 lbs and 3rd went to Paul & Troy with 6.01 lbs. The big bass for the night weighed 3.37 lbs and the 2nd big bass was 2.98 lbs. They were both caught by Ron & Joe so they made a nice haul for the night and the week. My dad and I were only able to come up with 4.97 lbs which put us in a disappointing 7th place for the night. For whatever reason we fished extremely poorly on Thursdays this year even though we ended up being team of the year on Wednesdays.

As you can tell from our weight we really struggled. We have been getting a lot of rain recently and since we figured the water would be up we obviously wanted to head to Games Lake. We found out quickly that they had not gotten as much rain right around the lake since we were unable to get our boat through the channel since it was much too shallow. That threw a wrench in our plans right off the bat but we regrouped quickly. Our first stop was a stretch of docks and I ended up catching a keeper on my very first cast. I caught another keeper on the very next dock. After that we ran more docks but it was a very long time until we were able to catch our 3rd fish. All those fish came on a black/blue Bleeding Bait tube. After that we tried some reeds where I was able to catch our biggest fish of the night which weighed around 2 lbs. That fish also came on a black/blue tube. We then tried another stretch of reeds where things really went wrong. We had probably 3 bites apiece but neither one of us was able to hook up at all. I don't know how big any of the fish were but with the low weights it wouldn't have taken much to move up. I have no clue why we couldn't catch any of those bites but it just didn't happen and the night was over.

These were the last 2 nights of league for the summer but we will be running the fall league again. We run the fall league on Saturdays since it's starting to get too dark in the evening this time of year. We also fish for 5 hours with a 5 fish limit instead of 3 hours with a 3 fish limit. Otherwise the rules are basically the same. We will be running these every Saturday until the end of October or as long as the weather permits. My next 2 events before the fall league begins are the Big Bass Bonanza TOC which is being held next weekend on Lake Osakis and then the week after that we have the Minnesota BASS Federation TOC on Lake Pokegama.