BassTrakk is an excellent tool for painting the picture of what’s transpiring during an Elite event, especially when making comparisons across multiple days. We’ll dig into all that data in a moment, but first let’s take a quick look at the concrete numbers from Day 1.
There were 428 fish brought to the scales, weighing 1,120- pounds, 3- ounces in total. Of the 90 anglers that competed on Day 1, 78 brought in a limit and no one zeroed. Brandon Cobb had the biggest bass, weighing 5-12 and the biggest bag belonged to Brandon Card, at 21-10. There were two other limits over 20- pounds, while 18-8 held down 10th and 12-2 was enough to secure the 47th place cutline.
These were the actual numbers brought to us by the official scales at the end of Day 1. When looking at BassTrakk numbers, we have to remember as always that they are guesstimated weights from our anglers and marshals. Furthermore, it’s worth pointing out this week that nearly half our anglers are out on Oahe without a marshal in the boat, thus making BassTrakk more unofficial even than usual.
BUT… we can still compare apples to apples quite well using BassTrakk this week as Day 1 relates to Day 2 and so on and so forth. In order to do that the rest of the week, let’s lay a foundation from what we saw yesterday.
Any fish 3- pounds and up this week represents a critical bite for almost every angler’s bag. So we’ll take a look at the breakdown of the 118 fish in that range that were entered into BassTrakk yesterday. That 118 consisted of:
| 93 | 3-pounders |
| 24 | 4-pounders |
| 1 | 5-pounder |
Here’s the breakdown by time of day of those catches greater than 3- pounds:
| 6-7: | 1 |
| 7-8: | 17 |
| 8-9: | 21 |
| 9-10: | 24 |
| 10-11: | 15 |
| 11-12: | 17 |
| 12-1: | 10 |
| 1-2: | 9 |
| 2-3: | 4 |
| 3-4: | 0 |
| 4-5: | 0 |
As you can see, there was a very definite window when many of the quality fish were caught yesterday. The 8 AM to 10AM window saw the best production, with strong showings from 7 to 8 when the anglers reached their starting spots, and a mirrored window of 17 of these quality catches between 11 and noon. But then the bite fell way off after lunch.
Perhaps part of this drop off is due to a few anglers being a little trigger happy on Day 1 when it came to pulling the plug on their primary spots. Several anglers like Seth Feider admitted they made the run back way too early, fearful that the wind picking up in the afternoon would make the ride super rough.
The worst-case scenario would be heading back too late and not having sufficient time to make it in. With little prior knowledge to pull from for making these long and rough rides on Oahe, several anglers like Feider aired on the side of caution and left their more productive areas too early, which could very well explain the large drop off in production around noon.
Feider mentioned his choice to do this for instance had him fishing water he had very little confidence in close to the ramp for the last two hours of his day. If this is the culprit, I predict we’ll see better numbers in the Day 2 BassTrakk data, as anglers will adapt their run times and stay on their primary areas longer.
