Big Bass Bonanza - Horseshoe Chain

The first event of five on the Big Bass Bonanza tournament circuit is in the books. It was held June 6th on the Horseshoe Chain of lakes near St. Cloud Minnesota. The tournament did not go as well as planned for my dad and I as we could only manage 14.07 lbs for our 8 fish limit. It was still not a total disaster though because even that small limit put us in 14th out of 32 teams. The winning team came in with 20.24 lbs and it took around 17.5 lbs to get a check. Obviously I would have liked to do a lot better than that but it wasn't a total bomb anyways. I also had the second biggest bass weighed in with a 4.18 lb smallmouth that just missed out on being the big bass of the day to a 4.26 lb largemouth. I believe big bass was worth $600 so coming so close but missing out hurt a little bit. You can also tell from doing the math that our other 7 fish weighed a combined 10 lbs. We just could not figure out how to get any more decent fish to bite despite having a fair practice period earlier in the week.

We started our day on an area with heavy vegetation in the form of curly leaf pond weed with a few pads mixed in hear and there. Normally I do not like fishing curly leaf since it rarely seems to hold bass for me but this area had a number of fish over 2 lbs during practice. We started by throwing frogs and flipping Sweet Beavers in the heavy cover but it didn't seem quite right. After longer than expected I had a blow up on the frog that missed but I was able to pick him up on a follow up cast but it was only barely over 12 inches. After that disaster struck. I had 3 fish hooked and almost all the way to the boat before they fell off for no apparent reason. The hooks were sharp as tacks and I really don't know why they came off. My dad then started getting bit on the frog but was never able to hook into any of them. Fortunately none of the lost or missed fish seemed to be the right size anyways. Unfortunately that meant our best area no longer seemed to hold the quality we needed.

After that we decided to go after smallmouth. They typically play a huge role in Horseshoe tournaments and we had found some good ones in practice. We had several spots within one general area of the lake and when we arrived there were boats on 2 of them. A third spot we had marked was vacant so we pulled in there and within 5 minutes I boated that 4.18 lb beauty on a watermelon/red flake Strike King Coffee tube. I really thought it was going to be on but that was the last good smallmouth we caught the rest of the day. After working the area thoroughly we slid up to a row of nearby docks where we caught a couple more small largemouth to get us closer to filling our limit. By that time the other boats had left and we fished the used water to catch a few more keeper smallies but nothing much over a pound.

The rest of the day was spent bouncing around between rocky smallmouth areas and dock/tree lined banks looking for a few more good fish which unfortunately never came. We were able to fill our limit with small largemouth but were just not able to find the right quality. I believe the winners were mainly fishing docks but we just didnt come across the right stretches I guess.

This tournament leaves me pretty unsatisfied. We are still in position to make the top 10 year end tournament so that is good and I'm not disappointed that we only caught small fish. We I don't like is the poor execution on the frog fish in the morning, even though I don't know what I could of done differently, and what I feel was semi-poor decision making on my part. I just didn't really feel it out there for whatever reason. Maybe it was because it was the first tournament of the year but it wasn't coming together in my head the way I would of liked. I'll chalk it up to being the first tournament and just move on. Even though it may seem like we weren't even close, just 2 more good bites would have moved us way up and into the money.

My next tournament is a West Central Bassmasters club event on Lake Minnewaska. This is the first of two events to determine which club members will go to the state tournament. I was out on Waska today and I probably shouldn't say anything but I will say I like what I see.