Big Bass Bonanza - Lake Ida

The second of five events on the BBB trail took place this past Sunday, June 20th on Lake Ida just north of Alexandria. There were 36 teams competing which was up slightly from the opening event a few weeks earlier. This is probably due to Ida being a much better fishing lake than the Horseshoe chain although the average size of the bass out there is pretty small. With 36 teams they ended up paying back 6 spots and my dad and I finished just out of the money in 7th place. We had an 8 fish limit for 16.70 lbs. With such a low weight I was pretty shocked to even be that close. The winning bag for the day was just over 24 lbs of smallmouth but 2nd place dropped all the way down to 17.81 lbs. The big bass for the day was a 3.96 lb largemouth.

Our practice for Ida was pretty tough overall and was interrupted by boat issues that cut our time short. Catching fish is never a problem on the lake but finding above average fish was extremely difficult even though an above average fish is only 2 lbs. We had located 2 areas that seemed to be holding more of the 2 lb fish at opposite ends of the lake. With that in mind we decided to start close to the launch site and get fishing quickly. The action started fast with a fish on my first cast but it wasn't a keeper. Several more short fish followed and we began to realize something had changed. We stuck around awhile longer and ended up adding 4 keepers but they were all small.

After that it was down to the other end of the lake to try our other "good" spot. This ended up being the same thing. A lot of small fish but the 2 pounders were gone. We did put our 8 fish limit together by about 8:30 am but we knew they would all have to be culled if we had any shot in this event. We fished around awhile longer but just couldn't find the right size so we decided to go to an area that only had small fish in practice. It was another stretch of deep weed line that has actually produced for us over the years but didn't seem to have the quality this year. For whatever reason the small fish in practice turned into 2 to 2 1/2 lb fish on tournament day though and we upgraded 7 times along that one weedline.

After the action slowed we went running docks and reeds for most of the afternoon looking for one big bite that would put us ahead of the rest of the field who we were sure would have limits of 2 lb fish. I was able to add 1 upgrade to our limit with a fish close to 2 lbs off of a dock but the big bite never came. After seeing the weights at the weigh in we realized that we messed up by leaving our honeyhole looking for a big bite that we didn't even need. I am almost positive that if we had sat on that one area the rest of the day we would have been able to cull up into 2nd place. There was no shot at first since they blew it away but I really wish we stayed put and just ground up a few ounces at a time. Hindsight is always 20/20 though.

Our weigh in fish, with the exception of the dock fish, came on watermelon LFT Twitch worms rigged on a drop-shot, watermelon Brush Hogs, and watermelon jigs. The dock fish came on a green pumpkin Strike King KVD tube.