The 2018 Yellow Bass Bonanza is now in the books. The event continues to get bigger and better every year! This year found my fishing partner Tim and I arriving Thursday evening and pre-fishing on Friday and Saturday to try to track down the sometime finicky fish. This year the bite was quite a bit different then it has been during previous tournaments. We spent a full day on Friday trying to locate schools of yellows on the “big lake “. We fished the usual spots farmers’ beach, camp tangle foot, Baptist church shore, and the pump house. Fishing was SLOW. We couldn’t keep the small (2-3inch) perch off of our lines and schools of yellows where nowhere to be found! As the day progressed we had some more company, and the consensus was the same, where are all the fish? We finished catching only 3 yellow bass on Friday.
Saturday was a different story. While chewing the fat with some fellow fisherman that were staying at the hotel on Friday night we gained some intelligence on what they were using with success. We dedicated our time to the little lake, and the lure they suggested, and was able to find them. We still had to move around and try to stay off the spots with little perch and or gills. We had our best bite in 10-12 foot of water. We located two spots that we had confidence in the little lake and tried not to advertise them. With hundreds of people fishing this was no small task. This water was a lot deeper than we have caught them in previous years. We decided to keep fish on Saturday and ended up with a nice bag of yellows, including a bonus nice crappie. The guys fishing next to us even gave us a white bass as they weren’t cleaning fish adding to the bucket.
We were off the water early and off to the Yellow Bass Bonanza Bash at the Surf Ballroom. We met up with some of our buddies and had a very nice dinner and drinks. We went over the official rules of the competition and tried our best at winning some door prizes. Sunday morning came soon enough and greeted us with a balmy temperature of 1 degree to start off the day. I had left the charger on the 4 wheeler that I had borrowed from my good friend Eric Deters over night and was able to get her warmed up. Having the mobility of two 4-wheelers this year were very beneficial. We made it over to the launch point with plenty of time to spare. We had over 20 fish by 11am and then our bite died. We moved once and tried to grind out our last 10 fish. Unfortunately, we only ended up with 25 fish to weigh and ended up in 88th place over all.
We primarily used small spoons in either gold or silver tipped with red spikes or a piece of cut bait from the yellows gill area. It was a lot of fun as always and I look forward to fishing it again next year!
