A couple of things I found interesting about the results were the average size of the bass and the lack of largemouths weighed in. The weights all the way down were very solid and that led to the average weight of all the fish weighed in being 2.64 lbs per bass. This is the heaviest average I can remember in the tournaments our club has run out there. What makes that more surprising to me is that the big largemouth have almost completely disappeared. In the past couple of years the largemouth in the 2-4 lb range had really taken off and to do well in tournaments you usually needed to have at least a few of them in your bag. This year only 24 of the 198 bass weighed were largemouth. I have no idea where those bigger green fish went and no one else I've talked to seems to know either. The big fish of the day was a 4.74 lb smallmouth which is an absolute giant for Green Lake in recent years.
Immediately prior to the event my dad and I were up at the Whitefish Chain for a week fishing the Minnesota B.A.S.S. Federation Nation TOC so with no chance to pre-fish Green that week I decided that we would not pre-fish Green at all beforehand. That made the last time we had seen the lake about 3 weeks earlier for our last league night of the season. I would never attempt this for any other tournament but I have an extensive history on Green and thought it would be kind of fun to just figure things out on the fly.
We decided to start in the same spot we ended our last league night. That evening they were blasting topwaters at the end of the night and the hope was that they would be doing the same thing right away in the morning. The area was a large sand and gravel flat with a few scattered weeds in 4-8 feet of water. Sure enough it was on as soon as we pulled up and they were hitting the Super Spook. We had probably a dozen bites but they just weren't really getting it very good. We didn't lose any fish but just had a hard time hooking up. We did land about half of them but only 1 ended up riding to the weigh in. That smallie was about 3 1/4 lbs.
After the topwater action slowed we moved slightly deeper to the 8-15 foot range to test out several thick milfoil beds. Right away I put a 3 lb class largemouth in the boat on a green pumpkin Strike King Coffee Tube and a short while later added a nice 3 3/4 lb smallie on a watermelon Sweet Beaver in a clearing between to milfoil patches. At this point it was still early in the morning and we had 3 quality fish in the boat with only 3 more to go. I was wondering if the bite was just wide open all over the lake or if we were really onto something.
I did want to check some deep water in the 20-30 foot range though because I really like catching them that way on Green so that was our next couple stops. It didn't take long to figure out that deep bite wasn't going to happen. I caught 1 tiny bass out deep but the other key was there was nothing on our HDS screens. No bait, no fish, the screens were just blank. It made our decision to focus on shallow to mid depths for the rest of the day pretty easy.
After checking the deep stuff we moved back to the 6-12 foot range for the rest of the day primarily focusing on milfoil patches and sand/gravel flats. I was able to catch our second biggest bass of the day on a chartreuse/white Strike King spinnerbait fished over the sand which was actually the first spinnerbait fish I had caught on Green Lake all year. The action was much slower for quality fish in the late morning through the afternoon but we just kept bouncing around to various milfoil patches and every once in awhile we would get a smallie in the 3 to 3 1/4 lb range by flipping various plastics into and around the weeds. We ended up catching a pile of fish on the day but not really a ton of quality fish. For the day we ended up with 7 that went 3 lbs or better but with a 6 fish limit that was enough to get the job done!
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