West Central Bass League - Norway/Games Lake Cup - June 22nd
This past Wednesday was the Norway/Games Lake Cup. In my previous post I talked about how the Cups work so I will skip that here. Despite the rainy and cold conditions I was surprised that 20 teams showed up to fish. It sounds like many teams were able to catch a lot of fish but as is typical for these lakes the past few years the weights overall were pretty small. Here are the results.
1st - Ron & Joe - 3 - 9.88 lbs
2nd - Jared & Tonya - 3 - 8.44 lbs
3rd - Tom & Jim - 3 - 8.23 lbs
4th - Brad & Wayne - 3 - 8.18 lbs
5th - Scott & Kelly - 3 - 8.05 lbs
Big Bass #1 - Brad & Wayne - 4.26 lbs
Big Bass #2 - Lee & Nick - 4.09 lbs
Our hot start to the season is officially over! My dad and I really struggled and only managed to boat 6 bass on the night. Our 3 best fish weighed in at 5.68 lbs which put us all the way down in 15th place for the night. Fortunately the way the league is structured each team is allowed to drop their 2 worst finishes and it looks like this will be one of them. Hopefully there aren't too many more bombs for us the rest of the way. As I said before the fishing was really tough for us and we scrambled around trying a variety of things but were only able to get bit in one place. That was an area of deep rocks that we plied with Rapala DT 16 crankbaits and jigs. All 3 of our weigh fish came on the crankbait though.
West Central Bass League - Lake Florida - June 23rd
The way we make the schedule for our bass league is to draw the lakes at random before the beginning of each year. As it turns out we ended up fishing Lake Florida twice in the first month of the season this year. Our club also had a state qualifier tournament on the lake so many of us have been on this body of water a bunch already this year. We actually had nice weather for once on a league night but for the 17 teams competing that did not translate to good fishing. For whatever reason the lake fished was extremely stingy for most of the competitors. Here are the results.
1st - Ron & Joe - 3 - 9.18 lbs
2nd - Paul & Troy - 3 - 8.78 lbs
3rd - Lee & Brad - 3 - 8.53 lbs
4th - Travis & Hunter - 3 - 7.08 lbs
5th - Andy & Mike Nitchals - 3 - 6.91 lbs
Big Bass - Ron & Joe - 3.99 lbs
After the huge disappointments of the last Big Bass Bonanza tournament and the previous nights league it was nice to get back in the money even if it was the last paying spot. It sure wasn't easy though. We only boated 3 bass for the entire night and were fortunate that those 3 were just enough to squeak in. We started on one of our usual deep water areas but nothing was happening at all so we quickly headed to some docks that also did not produce although my dad added a small keeper on a chatterbait throwing to open water as I fished the docks. After that it was back to the deep area to try to grind out a couple of good fish. I know those fish live there but getting them to bite was all but impossible. They really did not seem to want any slow moving lures so my dad started slow rolling the chatterbait and caught our 2nd keeper of the night. This prompted me to pull out a Rapala DT 10 and within a few casts I boated our final keeper of the night. Now we thought we were onto something but we were never able to get another bite the rest of the evening.
Green Mill/West Central Bassmasters Summer Classic - Green Lake - June 25th
This past Saturday marked the first of two open tournaments the West Central Bassmasters and Green Mill put on each year at Green Lake in Spicer Minnesota. The next event will be held on September 11th but for now let's talk about this one. We had 36 teams competing this year including some of the best local anglers as well as some of the best fishermen from throughout the state. Green is always a popular lake because it kicks out numbers of quality smallmouth and increasingly numbers of quality largemouth as well. This year the green fish did not come into play as much though as only 2 largemouth were weighed in among the top 8 teams. Compared to last year the top weights were better but from the sound of things the fishing was extremely tough for most everyone. It certainly was for my dad and I but we were able to put a little something together and weighed a 6 fish limit for 18.58 lbs which was good enough for 2nd place. Instead of posting the complete results here you can see them at this link:
At this time of year most anglers focus on the shallow rocks and there were certainly a number of fish up cruising and on beds but for us the primary plan was to fish deep structure. However we did start on a couple of nice bedding fish that I had found the previous afternoon. It was pretty dark first thing in the morning though and I was unable to see them. I hoped that blind fishing the area would produce a couple of bites but after half an hour without a bite it was off to our deep stuff. Green Lake is loaded with structure and there are hundreds if not thousands of little places where a smallmouth might live. We narrowed our efforts to 10 to 12 spots from 20 to 30 feet deep that we rotated through the rest of the day. As I said earlier the fishing wasn't easy by any means. It was just a matter of picking off one here and there throughout the day but the fishing did pick up noticeably in the afternoon for whatever reason. With about 10 minutes left in the day we headed to one last spot near the weigh in site where I added a nice 3 1/4 lb smallie at the last minute to give us just enough weight to edge out 3rd place. We have caught numerous key fish in the last minutes of fishing this year and it just shows that you can never give up! All of our weigh fish came on green pumpkin or watermelon LFT Twitch Worms rigged on a drop shot. There was nothing fancy about the rigging it was just a matter of putting our heads down and keeping our baits in what we felt were the highest percentage areas.
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