Kenora Bass International 2021
Preperation
After well over a week of Pre fishing Ian and I had figured out 2 different patterns and we’re confident we could land 3 good 5 limit bags of Smallmouths. While you can fish both Smallmouths and Largemouths in this tournament its typically won with 15 giant Lake of The Woods Bronzeback’s. Knowing this, we spent most of time prefishing for Smallmouths. We found the fish and keyed in on the baits they preferred.
Day 1
The night before the tournament we sat in the boat and rigged up rods, talking about the fish we had seen in pre-fish. We knew our game plan had a lot of variables but we were willing to risk it all, in hopes we would win.
We had a pretty good number to take off, but we knew that we had a lot of water to cover before could start fishing.
At the end of the day, we were super pumped to have weighed in our first bag over 20 LBS for a total of 20.19 and sitting in 1st place.
Day 2
Sitting in the bay on the morning of day two leading the kbi felt surreal. We blasted off with the same game plan as the day before. We knew we had to catch a big bag if we wanted to maintain the lead, and ultimately win the tournament.
Talk about the fishing
Even though we stumbled a little we were still holding on to 1st place with 17.49 on Day 2
The Final Day
As we sat in the bay on the morning of the third day, we reflected on how we have dreamt of this moment since we were both young. We ran down to our area we had been fishing in prior days and started off the morning with a 3.9, no more then 5 casts later Ian hooks up with a fish weighting just over 4 pounds. At this point we knew we were only one or two big bites away from winning the biggest tournament off our lives. Ian and I both fished as if our lives depended on it and came up with 17.19lbs of Lake of the woods bass. As we sat in the anishanabe bay, full of emotions, waiting for the trucks to pull us threw the tent, we reflected on how neither of us had ever been apart of the boat parade before so we didn’t know what to expect. After being pulled out by our driver we headed to the tent as the last boat in line, we sat there with calculators glued to our hands watching every team weight in. When it was finally our turn tom come through the tent our hearts where racing out of our chest. The excitement of the live crowd is something everyone needs to experience. We ended up clenching the victory over past winners Adam Bachinsky and Andrew Beernheart.
