Day 1 saw better weights than many of the anglers predicted, with 28-11 in the lead, 21-0 in 10th and 14-15 in 50th as the benchmark to advance to day three.
Looking at the BassTrakk data from day one, there were 718 fish logged. It’s important to note that there were way more legal keepers (fish over 12- inches) caught on day one. But as the stats will illustrate, many of those smaller fish aren’t logged later in the day after an angler has his limit.
With this in mind, we can look to the fish caught over 4- pounds, as they definitely made their way to the livewell no matter what time of day those were caught. Of the 718 bass logged, 74 were over 4- pounds.
Let’s look at the breakdown of keepers logged first.
718 total
| 7:30-8 | 12 |
| 8-9 | 92 |
| 9-10 | 116 |
| 10-11 | 121 |
| 11-12 | 83 |
| 12-1 | 89 |
| 1-2 | 97 |
| 2-3 | 54 |
| 3-4 | 45 |
| 4-4:30 | 9 |
Though as we mentioned before, some drop-off is expected in catch totals per hour later in the day because the smaller fish are released without being entered into BassTrakk. Though it’s still safe to say that one of the best bite windows came between 9 AM and 11 AM.
In that 2-hour span, 237 keepers were logged. That’s 33% of all the fish logged yesterday. That was likely the best feeding window of the day all things considered.
But another likely reason we saw this many fish caught here is that anglers will often try to catch a limit on Okeechobee first throwing reeling baits like lipless crankbaits, and then go looking for the elusive big bite with a punching rod or some other big fish technique.
The second-best window for total fish logged came between 12 and 2, with 186 catches.
Now let’s shift our focus to the fish logged over 4- pounds, as again this will give us a better gauge of when the big bite windows were. There were 74 fish over 4- pounds logged on day one, and this is the breakdown by weight.
74 fish over 4- pounds
| 4- pounders | 29 |
| 5- pounders | 28 |
| 6- pounders | 9 |
| 7- pounders | 7 |
| 8- pounders | 1 |
By time of day, we get this.
| 7:30-8 | 0 |
| 8-9 | 6 |
| 9-10 | 10 |
| 10-11 | 17 |
| 11-12 | 8 |
| 12-1 | 6 |
| 1-2 | 11 |
| 2-3 | 11 |
| 3-4 | 4 |
| 4-4:30 | 1 |
We find that the best big bite window came between 9 AM and 11 AM as well, with the second best window coming between 1 PM and 3 PM. There were 27 and 22 fish caught over 4- pounds in those windows respectfully.
Taking only Scott Martin’s day one data into consideration, we can see that it perfectly illustrates the early window, as he caught all of his 25-11 from 9:11 to 10:58 in the morning.
With fairly similar conditions on Okeechobee today, we should see similar bite windows. Look for a mid-morning rally where lots of anglers will start adding big ones to the well. And then a late-day push where the weights really start to add up.
