A couple weeks ago, my grandpa and I fished our final bass tournament of 2018, known as the classic. The two day derby was held on Florida’s largest lake, Lake Okeechobee. The huge lake is 730 square miles in size and is historically one of the best fisheries in the country. I was super excited to fish the large lake in the season finale.
Practice on Okeechobee the day prior to the first day of the tournament was was slow for my grandpa and I. We caught a few fish, but didn’t figure out a reliable pattern.
Day one of the tournament was a struggle. We didn’t land our first fish until about 10 o’clock that morning. We’d found an area with some clear water and used jerkbaits to catch our limit within the next two hours, but all we had was small fish. We only weighed in 7.25 pounds that day and were nowhere near the top of the leaderboard.
On the second day of the tournament, my grandpa and I returned to the area we’d caught our fish the day before. It was a long canal that had a couple of smaller canals connected to it. We worked that area the entire tournament day and caught quite a few bass. My grandpa had caught one fish close to five pounds that had really helped out total weight. By noon, we’d caught close to twenty fish and a decent bag for a tough lake at the time. Weigh in was at 1pm, so we headed back around 12:30pm.
We ended up weighing in 11.65 pounds on the final day of the tournament. It wasn’t great, but it was better than the day before and it gave us enough to climb back into the top five. We came in 4th place and made a check. We were bother happy with our finish. It was a good way to end our first year of fishing bass tournaments together.
