Brothers Cory and Chris Johnston were in 5th and 7th place respectively to start Day 2 of the 53rd Bassmaster Classic. Not for nothing, the brothers are from Canada as is our Day 1 leader, Jeff Gustafson. An admittedly forced statistic, it’s still worth mentioning that of the top 7 anglers after Day 1, 43% are international anglers all hailing from Canada. That’s quite impressive and certainly never happened in the prior 52 Classics.
But what’s even more impressive is the consistency we see event after event out of the Johnston brothers. They were within 6 ounces of one another at the end of Day 1. The two biggest bass in Corey’s bag were smallmouth, no surprise there. But the two Chris held up at weigh-in were largemouth, a little more of a shock.
Don’t misunderstand me, both the brothers are more than capable of catching largemouth and actually cut their teeth doing so. But when they are pursuing brown bass, their expertise in the matter really elevates them above the competition time and time again. With leader Gustafson having all smallmouth and Corey as well, the smallmouth are apparently here. But Chris for some reason when shallow for largemouth.
This is just another indicator of how these two fisheries are so hard to dial in. From the outside, it’s easy to look at a couple big bags of smallmouth and wonder why bronze back finesse experts like Brandon Palaniuk, Chris Zaldain, Clifford Pirch and others aren’t doing the same thing and having the same success. They very well would be on northern fisheries like the St Lawrence, but this is not that. The schools here are very hard to find.
The fact that not even both of the Johnston brothers are targeting smallmouth is another clear indicator that concentrations of these fish are scarce, concentrations of the better ones at least. It’s important to keep in mind that a smallmouth has to be over 18 inches here to keep.
The brothers Johnston work as a team on the Elites and share every bit of information and experience they can muster. They apparently decided one would go for the smallmouth and the other would run the junk fishing pattern for largemouth, splitting all their eggs up into two baskets. This worked to near perfection on Day 1, with both in great position to still make a run at this thing. We’ll see if the smallmouth or the largemouth bite better today, it should be easy to tell based on whichever Johnston is on top.
