It is hard to believe that the first tournament of the year for me came on June 15th! With the restrictions in place because of the COVID-19 situation, bass tournaments in Minnesota were on hold. Fortunately, we are good to go now and we are going to be going wide open for the rest of the summer and making the most of our time on the water!
The first tournament we had was the Denny’s Super 30 on Lake Minnetonka and despite a stiff 20-30 mph south wind and the Minnetonka bass being in a post-spawn funk, ten teams brought in their six fish limit bigger than 19 lb’s and just over 21 lb’s taking the win. My partner and I junk fished our way to a 19 lb 2 oz limit and finished in 8th place, a great way to start the tournament season and earning us valuable points for the team of the year standings.
In practice, we divided our time between searching the shallows for post-spawn cruisers and bass hanging around bluegill beds looking for an easy meal, and then deep for bass that had already moved to their summertime locations.
Over the course of the tournament, we targetted both shallow and deep water…a true junk fishing type day! Despite running multiple patterns and using a multitude of lures, we still relied on key Witch Doctor Tackle rods to ensure we were able to present our baits properly and then aid in hooking and getting the bass to the boat.
Here is a look at three key rods we used:
- Kahuna 7’4″ Heavy: Fishing a ChatterBait put three key bass in the boat for us and without a doubt this rod is the BEST vibrating jig rod on the market! My line choice is 15 lb monofilament.
- Shaman 7′ Heavy: To coax schooling smallmouth and bluegill feeding bass, we used poppers and this rod hooked them good and has a nice parabolic bend to it so the treble hooks didn’t pull out. I like to spool up and use 40 lb Seaguar Smackdown braid when fishing my topwater plugs.
- Voodoo II 7’2″ Heavy: From pitching boat docks, to casting at isolated patches of emergent vegetation, this rod is a jack of all trades. A 7/16 oz Texas-rigged Zoom Z-Craw, rigged on TroKar TK133 hook caught some fish for us. I like to fish 17 lb Seaguar Inviz X Fluorocarbon on this setup.
Until the next tournament, enjoy the summer and time on the water!
