Going into the tournament on Green Lake, near Spicer for the third Big Bass Bonanza I knew my partner Mike and I needed a strong finish since after the last event we dropped down to the 12th in the year end standings and only the top ten make the championship.

The only other time I have been on Green was in the spring, so fishing was going to be drastically different. After practice Mike had some decent largemouth located, but we both knew if we were going to do well, we would need some of the big Green Lake smallmouth.

After a tough and slow morning and only having three small largemouth in the livewell at 11:00, we made the switch to smallies and things finally started to click!

By fishing my drop-shot on breaks that had a combination of sand, rock and weed on them I was able to start hooking up with some good smallmouth. My drop-shot consisted of a size 1 TROKAR Drop Shot hook, with a 1/4 oz. weight at the bottom of a 8 in. drop line. I used a variety of plastics such as finesse worms and Senkos.

Key To Success:
Whole combination of rod, line and hook. My 7'2" Wright & McGill Tessera Drop Shot rod was key in feeling the lite biting smallmouth and then allowed me to do a long sweep hook set to get the fish to the boat. The TROKAR hooked kept those fished buttoned perfectly. I used 10 lb. Seaguar Inviz X and could feel every rock and weed I touched and had good abrasion resistance so it could take a beating on the cover.

My partner was flipping craw tubes to catch his fish and we quickly finished out our limit and decided to hit a section of docks. With in minutes Mike hooked up on a nice largemouth, which helped our limit out. This dock ended up producing two nice largemouth for us.

Our big fish of the day came on a rock flat that hit a Senko. This 4.5 lb. healthy largemouth ended up being the second big bass of the tournament.

One the way in to weigh in, Mike and I knew we had a good limit, but not sure we could pull out the W though with some of the tough competition we were up against. When all said and done, we landed in 4th place with 18.74 lb.'s for an 8 fish limit. This also should give us a good boost in the year end standings!

The next Big Bass Bonanza event is on August 8th on Lake Minnewaska. Last year in the MN Silverado Pro-Am I took 9th here, so I'm looking forward to getting back out there!

My next three tournaments are all on the Mississippi River and two are finally back on my home water, so I'm very excited and hope I can report some good news to all of you out there in the next few weeks.

For more information, check out my Website.

Here is a video recap of the top 3 finishers from Green Lake.