Big Bass Bonanza - Sauk Lake

The 5th and final event on the Big Bass Bonanza circuit was held August 22nd on Sauk Lake. The fishing was extremely tough for the 31 teams competing and even the teams who did well reported catching very few fish. In fact only 8 limits were brought to the scales and 7 teams weighed no fish. My dad and I ended up in the middle with 4 fish for 10.38 lbs. That put us in 17th place out of the 31 boats. This was just barely enough for us to hang on to a top 10 spot in the Team of the Year standings. We finished the TOY standings in 8th place with 193 points and the 10th place team finished with 190 points so there was very little cushion for us. With our top 10 finish we will be fishing the BBB TOC on Lake Koronis in a few weeks.

Going into this event we knew the fishing would be extremely difficult but I was still confident we could put our 8 fish limit in the boat. We practiced for one day and had 2 patterns going. The main pattern was fishing docks and trees but this is what everyone else does on Sauk too. Our other pattern involved fishing shallow weedlines which we felt would get a little less pressure. At the end of the day neither pattern ended up working well for us but we did get 2 of our weigh fish from the docks and trees and 2 of our fish from the weedlines. Besides a couple of short fish we only had one other bite the whole day. It ended up being the worst fishing I have experienced in 3 years on the Big Bass Bonanza circuit.