There were 727 fish entered into BassTrakk on Day 1 of the Guaranteed Rate Bassmaster Elite at St Lawrence River. The breakdown of when those fish were caught can be seen below:
| 7-8 | 66 |
| 8-9 | 131 |
| 9-10 | 100 |
| 10-11 | 141 |
| 11-12 | 113 |
| 12-1 | 67 |
| 1-2 | 56 |
| 2-3 | 34 |
| 3-4 | 15 |
| 4-5 | 4 |
Right away it’s easy to identify that there were some significant feeding windows, the two best coming between 8 and 9 AM and 10 and 11AM. The big jump from the first hour to the second can be explained by the initial run of the morning as anglers made their way to their starting spots. And the catches trailing off in the afternoon can be explained away by the fact that many anglers had already caught most of their weights by that time and were either laying off their fish, making their way back in or just simply weren’t entering small fish catches at that point since those fish wouldn’t cull to change the bottom line of their bags.
If we dig a little deeper though, we can see when the bigger fish were caught, giving us a little better view of the bite throughout the day since these 4- pound plus fish were likely tracked regardless of the time of day they were caught. There were 221 total bass over 4-pounds logged into BassTrakk on Day 1. The breakdown by hour is below:
| 7-8 | 12 |
| 8-9 | 29 |
| 9-10 | 26 |
| 10-11 | 45 |
| 11-12 | 41 |
| 12-1 | 23 |
| 1-2 | 22 |
| 2-3 | 13 |
| 3-4 | 9 |
| 4-5 | 1 |
Now we can see the best window for big bites actually shifts a little to 10AM though 12PM, with steady big bass production coming in the 8 to 10AM window as well as the 12 to 2PM window. But as steady as the bite was in those two windows, the 4-pound plus bite was nearly twice as good during that best feeding window of the day from 10 to 12.
With similarly calm conditions again today, it’ll be interesting to see if this window holds up when we get our data in this afternoon, and if it continues on throughout the weekend.
