Sturgeon Bay Open

After a few weeks spent at home in Sunset Country, it was back on the road in early May to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin to fish a couple of smallmouth tournaments.  Dave Bennett and I have been fishing the Sturgeon Bay Open since 2006 so it's been an annual event for us for several years.  I missed the tournament last year because of an FLW Tour event taking place the same weekend in Alabama.  

We fished an NABC (North American Bass Circuit) tournament the weekend before the Open and had a good derby, bringing in a five fish limit weighing 26-12, good enough for 5th spot.  The winners of that event, Chris Cox and Jason Stangel had a gigantic 30-00 limit for five smallmouths!  That's sick!  

Here are the full results from that event: http://northamericanbasscircuit.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Sturgeon-Bay-Final.pdf

After that first tournament we had a few days to practice and fine tune the bite.  The fishing was a little bit tougher than it's been in the past because the water temperatures were so cold.  The fish just weren't spread out all over in the bays yet, but if you got into a wad of them, you could catch some big ones!  

The highlight of my week was catching this magnum smallmouth, my personal best, a 7.60 pound KONG!  

There are so many big smallmouths at this place, it's a lot of fun.  I changed trolling motors on my boat for this event, switching from a Minn Kota Fortrex to a Terrova, so we could use the handy "spot-lock" function to hold us on specific offshore structure.  It worked really well!  I highly recommend it for Great Lakes smallmouth fishing.  Some of the best smallmouth guys I know - Derek Strub, Caleb Colwell and Mark Raveling are all running these motors.  

We had a great tournament this year and started things out with a STOUT 33.42 pound limit on day one that landed us in fourth place.  We caught a bunch of big fish that day and had a blast!  

Our big fish of the day was just a hair under seven pounds.  Caught on a Northland Impulse Tube (Green Pumpkin).

The fishing got a lot tougher for everybody on day two because of the calm winds...which are nice for traveling but don't help the fishing.  The water is so clear that the fish can see you coming from a long ways away.  We had a solid limit the second day weighing 29.52 pounds that actually boosted us up in the standings for a 2nd place overall finish!  

Congratulations to our friends who won the tournament, Scott Ourado and John Allan, local anglers who have fished the event since the first one took place 24 years ago!  They have fished the Kenora Bass International and Fort Frances Canadian Bass Championships many times over the years as well.  

A complete listing of the standings can be found here: http://www.sbobt.org/page/live-leaderboard/live-leaderboard-by-team-place/