The Badlands Bass Bandits club camping weekend has come and gone already. And what a successful fun weekend for all involved.

Sheep Creek Dam Bass Fest
Saturday morning, nine boats arrived at the landing at Sheep Creek Dam ready to duke it out in an MLF style format derby where every fish over 14” counts and most cumulative inches wins. Sheep Creek has a great track record in previous bandits’ events producing numbers of healthy sized largemouth that can get any of our anglers excited for a day of fishing. Once the excitement of our idle speed only shotgun start concluded, the bass had other plans and proved to be difficult for the anglers to entice into biting. Out of nine boats, six scorable bass were recorded during the entire outing, making for a very tough bite. The young blazing gun Alex Martel and his teammate Ty Gray managed to boat 2 fish for 35 cumulative inches with Alex catching the biggest of the event at 19” that just tipped the scales over 4 pounds, earning both the winning title for most cumulative inches and biggest bass of the event. Brett Messall takes the award as tiny bass slayer fishing with Kyle Okke catching only one scorable bass but managing to wrangle 6 more fish under 14” he solidifies the smallest bass title catching a 10” largie flipping his weightless tube far up in the mats.

Ladder Ball Tournament
Saturday evening the group camped together at Tschida’s downstream campground and had a potluck bbq with an extremely competitive ladder ball tournament that followed. 12 teams played a double elimination tournament that ended with the championship battle between Paul Reinbold/Curt Manley vs Bob Reinbold/Felipe Ferreria. Bob and Felipe had to claw their way through the elimination bracket after loosing a match early in the tournament and were dominating the racks and had to beat team Reinbold/Manley twice to finally claim the title of ladder ball champs for the event. A great night was had by all members who attended!

Tschida Tournament
Sunday morning marked the start of the 5th tournament of the Badlands Bass Bandits 2020 tournament trail with the biggest showing of the season so far with 15 teams launching for the event! Fishing was good for all teams and some great bags were brought in. Coming in 1st place was Team Eric Vossler, Thomas Leintz, and James Decker with a 5 fish bag weighing 13.04 pounds. 2nd goes to team Colton Blomberg and John Lancaster with a 5 fish limit of 12.67 pounds and right on their tail was team Tony McKay and Ty Gray with 12.62 pounds coming in 3rd! Big bass went to Team Justin and Cami Enney with a 3.29-pound smallie! After the group “spilled the beans” it was uncovered that two patterns were capitalized, a crawfish and baitfish pattern. The winning teams all caught their biggest fish using swim jigs, spinnerbaits, and topwater targeting shallow structure like rocks, grass, and docks. A solid crawfish bite was present as many anglers reported live wells full of crawfish parts but the biggest of bass that brought winning weights were caught on eliciting a reaction bite to a baitfish imitator. As always when our anglers spill the beans, everyone learns and we all improve as anglers, thank you all to attended this event and we hope to see you all on August 1st for our next tournament on New Johns that launches out of the East Park Ramp at 6:30 a.m.!