Lake Calhoun is one of the more popular lakes on the league schedule and it showed on Wednesday night as 22 teams showed up to fish. That is our highest turnout of the year so far. I think it is such a popular lake because catching numbers of fish is generally not difficult at all although finding the bigger bites can be a much tougher challenge. A few teams were able to find them though. Here are the results.
1st - Andy & Mike Nitchals - 3 - 12.53 lbs
2nd - Grant & April King - 3 - 10.50 lbs
3rd - Ron & Joe - 3 - 8.70 lbs
4th - Kyle & Kirk - 3 - 8.63 lbs
5th - Scott & Kelly - 3 - 8.33 lbs
Big Bass - Andy Nitchals - 4.70 lbs
This win marked our 5th in a row to start off the league season! Streaks like this have been put together before in the West Central Bass League but I don't know if it's ever happened at the start of the year like this. In any case it feels really good to have everything working right. Our night actually started off pretty slow though as we fished a stretch of docks and only had 1 small keeper to show for it. After that we moved off shore where we added another small keeper and immediately after my dad caught our limit fish that was close to 3 1/2 lbs. Catching 2 fish so quickly had me thinking we were on a school but after fishing for quite awhile longer in the area we were unable to generate anymore bits. After that we heading to the reeds and tucked in among all the other boats. The fish were biting good but most of them were small. We were able to get 2 fish in the 2 1/2 lb range though and I figured that would be a pretty good bag for the night although not enough to win so we headed back off shore to try to find that school of big ones I knew was sitting out there. It took awhile but eventually we found them and it was game on! In the last 45 minutes I don't even know how many fish in the 2 1/2 to 4 lb range we caught. It was wild and the best part was the fish kept getting bigger as the night went on. With a 9:00 pm check in I caught the big fish of the night at 8:58 pm. I wanted to stay and keep pounding on them but we had to go in. All of those fish came on homemade jigs and various colors of texas rigged Sweet Beavers.
West Central Bass League - Green Lake Cup - June 16th
Each year the West Central Bass League holds a "Cup" event on Green and Norway Lakes. They are basically the same format with a slightly higher entry fee and instead of one big bass two are paid. In past years the Cups generated much more interest but lately they haven't seemed to and this year was no different as only 16 teams came out to fish on Green Lake. We had much nicer weather than when we fished Green the first week of the season but once again the bite was extremely tough. Here are the results.
1st - Paul & Troy - 3 - 9.46 lbs
2nd - Andy & Mike Nitchals - 3 - 9.00 lbs
3rd - Craig & Jeff - 3 - 8.57 lbs
4th - Scott & Don - 3 - 8.39 lbs
Big Bass #1 - Craig & Jeff - 4.29 lbs
Big Bass #2 - Paul & Troy - 3.43 lbs
As you can see the streak is over at 5. I won't complain though since 2nd is not such a bad place to be either. I hadn't been on the lake since the last league night so I wasn't really sure what was going on with the fish. We started on some milfoil but that didn't produce so we went up to some shallow rocks where I quickly put 3 small bed fish in the box just to have a limit. They were very small I wouldn't normally waste time on them but they bite within 5 casts so it didn't take up much time. Next it was off to another spawning area where I found a 3 lb class fish on a bed. It took about 5 minutes working it with a watermelon/red Strike King Coffee Tube to put that one in the boat. After that the clouds rolled in and wind picked up so I scrapped plans to search for more bed fish and instead headed out deep. It was pretty slow but we added 2 more solid fish on LFT Twitch Worms rigged on a drop shot fished in 20 to 30 feet of water and that was it for the night.
Big Bass Bonanza - Lake Minnewaska - June 19th
I don't really know what to say about this one. After getting in the groove right off the bat to start the season this tournament was just a disaster! So far every decision I made seemed to be right but in this one nothing went right. We were just never able to put anything together and ended up with an 8 fish limit for 14.51 lbs and that was with a near 4lb fish that I caught with 15 minutes to go. Without that fish it would have been even uglier! That put us in 26th place out of 39 teams on the day. The winning weight was right around 22 lbs so obviously we were not even close.
I could go through all the details of the day as I normally do but that would be pretty pointless. We spent the majority of our day fishing weedlines in 10 to 15 feet of water with jigs and various soft plastics and actually caught a lot of fish. The problem was they were all 1 1/2 lbs or less. The funny thing is that most of the top finishers including the winners were fishing this exact same pattern. We just never got into the right areas for some reason. Part of the problem was that we found what seemed to be a big school of fish in practice with nothing under 2 1/2 lbs in it. We checked it 3 different times throughout the day and spent nearly half our total time trying to figure out how to get them to bite but they just never did! We caught plenty of fish in the area but they were all small. Another problem was the way the fish were biting. I had probably 8 bites that tore the flappers off my jig trailer without ever getting a hook into any of them as well as numerous other missed bites. Of course they were probably small fish but if even a couple of them were nicer fish it would have helped a bunch. Even our big fish that I caught at the end of the day bit my trailer off the jig and I was fortunate to pitch right back into the same spot and have her bite again.
This was by far my worst performance in 3 plus years of fishing the Big Bass Bonanza circuit and I have to say it stings a little bit. Especially after the hot start to the season where it seemed nothing could go wrong. That's fishing though. Bad days are going to happen. Unless your name is KVD!
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