Memorial Day Weekend Fun on Wood Lake!

As we continue into 2020’s uncharted waters with the impact of COVID19, the Bandits set forth on their next chapter of the 2020 season on Wood Lake! As uncharted waters go, not only did we continue to adhere to North Dakota’s social distancing guidelines by fishing a catch-measure-picture-release format via the @fishdonkey app, but this is the first time the Bandits have fished Wood Lake.

Reports from anglers pre-fishing the prior weekend were of heavy pre-spawn action for both largemouth and smallmouth bass. When the tournament kicked off Saturday the feel that the lake was in pre-spawn had faded fast as the field of competitors worked through a tough bite that felt more like spawn. But as we all know even with a tough bite, some anglers do find a pattern and are able to exploit that bringing in some great bass!

Coming in 1st was team Arth with an 89” stringer entirely made of smallmouth! Their winning pattern was fishing isolated rocks offshore with hair jigs and a Ned rig. In 2nd and only 4.25 inches behind was team Bullinger with an 84.25” stringer of largemouth. They switched from jigs to a dropshot to keep their finesse presentation from the vegetation off the lake floor. Only 3” behind Bullinger’s for 3rd place was Team Kyle Okke and Ben Wednt, they caught a mixed bag of both largemouth and smallmouth for a stringer of 81.25”, working finesse jigs extremely slow gave them success. As you can gather from the top three teams, the key to success was finesse!

Another treat for the club members fishing this event was Team Jason Mitchell and Tory Holen. They had an opportunity to fish this tournament with us and partook in our post-tournament wrap up. It was great to see a great multi-species angler like Jason fish with the Bandits and share in post-tournament festivities. We all hope to see more of them in future events!
Our next tournament will be on Lake Sakakawea at Dakota Waters Resort on June 6th. Great news is we have tournament permits for the remainder of the 2020 season! This means we will be resuming traditional format with launch and weigh ins.