WCB/Green Mill Summer Classic - Green Lake

Saturday June 26th marked the first of two events my Federation Nation club, the West Central Bassmasters, and Green Mill Restaurant will be holding this year on Green Lake in Spicer Minnesota. We had 33 teams show up from all over the state to compete on one of the premier tournament lakes in Minnesota. Although it is one of the best lakes in the state, this year it had been fishing tougher than I have ever seen it and many teams struggled to catch quality fish. There are always a few who figure it out though and some very nice bags were brought to the scales. With 33 teams competing, 6 spots were paid. Big bass of the day also earned a check.

1st - John & Jacob Zvorak 6 fish 18.89 lbs

2nd - Seth Fieder & Austin Felix 6 fish 18.58 lbs

3rd - Andy & Mike Nitchals 6 fish 17.68 lbs

4th - Matt & Verney Klemm 6 fish 17.50 lbs

5th - Jason Dudek & Jason Holmer 6 fish 16.90 lbs

6th - Paul Shimek & John Lindgren 6 fish 15.33 lbs

Big Bass - Matt & Verney Klemm 4.28 lbs

As you can see the weights at the top were pretty tight together as is usually the case on Green Lake but after that they began to tail off quite quickly. Only half the field was able to weigh in over a 2 lb. average which shows just how tough the lake is fishing right now. Another interesting note is the number of largemouth weighed in. Traditionally this has been a smallmouth lake and that is what most people fish for but in this tournament 70 largemouth were weighed compared to 88 smallmouth weighed. That is getting pretty close to a 50/50 mix. The big bass for the day was also a largemouth which is almost always the case in recent years.

My next tournament on Green is coming up July 11th on the Big Bass Bonanza circuit so in this post I cannot be very detailed with my fishing report. It looks like it is going to be hot for the next 2 weeks though so the fish will be moving and probably doing some completely different things by then but I still don't want to reveal too much. After the BBB tournament I will maybe get more detailed about the patterns and spots used for both tourneys.

So what can I say about this event? I guess there are a few things that I can reveal. It is pretty well known, amongst many in the area, that I enjoy fishing deep on Green. That was not the case this year though. I was not able to find any deep water areas I had confidence in for the tournament. All of the fish we caught came from water 10 feet deep or less. As far as what type of areas we were fishing in the shallow water I won't say but we fished a variety of spots. There were a couple keys subtleties that seemed to make a big difference though.

I will also say that one lure really produced much better than any others for us and that was a tube. We rigged it a variety of ways and worked them in several different ways as well. We did end up catching probably around 35-40 fish on the day and the vast majority of them came on a tube. Another interesting note is that the majority of the fish we caught were largemouth. We still caught around 15 smallies but I don't ever remember catching so many largemouth on a tournament day, especially since we were not necessarily targeting largemouths specifically. Our final bag ended up consisting of 3 smallies and 3 largemouths which is probably more largemouth than I have weighed in out of all my other tournaments out there combined.

Well I've probably said too much already but I hope that was an interesting read and still sufficiently vague.