Big Bass Bonanza - Lake Osakis

Sorry for the delay guys. I didn't quit writing the blog but I was out of town for a week for the state tournament and after that I guess I just wasn't in the writing mood. It's not because the fishing has been bad though. The results over my past four tournaments have been very solid although I haven't been able to pull out a win. There's a little preview for you I guess but first things first. September 6th was the Big Bass Bonanza Tournament of Champions. Only the top 10 teams in points at the end of the 4 regular season events were invited to fish this no entry fee championship. By virtue of our tie for 3rd place in the standings my dad and I were allowed to fish. Each team threw the name of a lake in a hat and Osakis was the one chosen. The fishing for us was pretty good and we ended up with a limit of 8 fish for about 20 1/4 lbs. This was good enough for 3rd place and a nice little payday.

The problem with Osakis is the vast amount of "dead" water. There are miles and miles of reeds but seemingly no fish in most of them. On the flipside to that is once you do find a fish there are usually a lot more in the area. After flipping those miles of reeds in practice we ended up with 2 main areas that held numbers of quality fish. On the tournament day only 1 of them ended up producing a lot of fish for us but the other one did give up 2 of our biggest fish. Flipping the reeds with jigs and soft plastics is basically what we did for pretty much the entire 8 hour tournament day. My dad also added 2 of our better keepers on a swimbait from the same reeds and later in the afternoon we hit one stretch of docks where I added another solid keeper on a tube. We didn't catch any big fish but we had 5 fish in the 2 1/2 - 3 lb range and the others weren't too much smaller. We spent most of the day within sight of the eventual winners but they were able to get a couple slightly bigger bites to push them up to 22 lbs and we just didn't get a few of those bites so that was kind of frustrating but overall it was a very good performance.

Immeditately after the weigh in at Osakis my dad and I headed up to Grand Rapids to begin practice for the Minnesota Bass Federation TOC on Lake Pokagema. Offical practice actually began the day before so we lost 2 days of practice but still had 2 more days to figure something out. This tournament is an individual tournament unlike most of our team tournaments so we would need to find enough fish for each of us to use over the 2 days of the tournament. I'll have the report of that tournament up soon.