I fished the whole season with fellow WesternBass writer Dan Rice. We had a decent year for our first time fishing this series and really wanted to do well in this event. We spent at least one day each week over the past month on Banks trying to figure it out. We had fish located in several areas of the lake and keyed on using Megabass Vibration X lipless crankbaits, spinnerbaits and jerkbaits in the shallow water and then hula grubs in deeper water.
Our main areas were found using map study and idling around with my Navionics+ card.
We ended the first day with only 10.04lbs of all smallmouth, which put us in 32nd out of 65 teams...right in the middle of the pack. We caught them early with football heads and then the bite died and we never upgraded after 9:00. It was rough!
Here is Dan with two of our fish.
After seeing the standings and knowing the leaders had several largemouth in their 17.00lb bag, we decided to focus on largemouth for Day 2. We caught two of them in the morning, but again struggled when the sun came out. It was a disappointing finish, but we learned quite a bit about this lake and hope to do better next year. I will have a chance of redemption as the Spokane Bass Club has an event this weekend and I feel good about my chances in this event.
Here is a look at one of our areas, it really jumps out on the map and is enhanced with the Navionics card. The hump is basically in the middle of the lake, but had a good amount of fish on it. I hope the bigger ones moved up this week.
Standard Nav Charts
SonarCharts
Results can be found here: http://nwbass.net/results_banks%20champ ... 202014.htm
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