Day 1 of the Guaranteed Rate Bassmaster Elite at the Mississippi River was an exciting one, full of topwater action and seeing better weights than our anglers predicted throughout practice. We’re going to look at some of the numbers from BassTrakk in a moment, but let’s first report on the hard data that we saw come out of weigh-in.
Of the 90 anglers competing, 73 caught a 5-fish limit and 419 fish in all were brought to the scales. The total weight of fish weighed on Day 1 tallied 1,038 pounds and 4 ounces, with Brock Mosley bringing in the biggest fish of the day, a 5-8 largemouth.
Swapping over to the BassTrakk numbers, we can establish when the best fishing times of the day were. To do this, let’s look at the fish caught over 3 pounds since that’s the benchmark for a “good one” here this week. There were 65 fish over 3-pounds registered into BassTrakk on Day 1 and 645 bass in all.
| 3-pounders | 60 |
| 4-pounders | 3 |
| 5-pounders | 2 |
Looking at the times these fish were caught, we see:
| 7 a.m. – 8 a.m. | 7 |
| 8 a.m. – 9 a.m. | 11 |
| 9 a.m. – 10 a.m. | 14 |
| 10 a.m. – 11 a.m. | 6 |
| 11 a.m. – 12 p.m. | 9 |
| 12 p.m. – 1 p.m. | 6 |
| 1 p.m. – 2 p.m. | 7 |
| 2 p.m. – 3 p.m. | 4 |
| 3 p.m. – 4 p.m. | 1 |
The best bite certainly came early when looking at these 3-pound-plus fish. Considering several anglers were still taking off and making the run to their starting spots between 7 and 8 AM, it’s fair to say that there was a consistent big bite for the first three hours of this tournament.
It’ll be interesting to see how much the numbers will move on Day 2. Due to the weather delay, there will be nothing to report from 7 to 8 AM. But based on what we’ve seen on BassTrakk this morning, it looks like there’s still been a good bite early. It’s just not necessarily happening for a lot of the same anglers from Day 1 to Day 2.
There’s also a likelihood that several anglers laid off their best stuff a bit as the day wore on yesterday. The general consensus among the guys was that 12- pounds per day would be strong this year. Instead, that actual number was a little higher around 13- pounds, which was good enough for 33rd yesterday while 12-pounds landed in 47th.
Taking this into consideration, the anglers that eased up yesterday will not be taking their foot off the gas today, especially with the field being cut to 47 boats for tomorrow. Outside of a handful of anglers near the top of the leaderboard, there will be no conserving fish today, as anglers fight to extend their seasons one more day.
