MACOMB COUNTY, Mich. — The fourth-place fishery in the newly released 2024 Bassmaster Top 100 Lakes takes center stage this week. Will it live up to the hype?
All it takes is reviewing recent tournament statistics to consider how the bass fishing might play out at this week’s St. Croix Bassmaster Open at St. Clair presented by SEVIIN. That data comes from the 2023 Bassmaster Elite held there July 27-30, when Joey Cifuentes won the four-day event with 91 pounds, 8 ounces of smallmouth.
The Open is two weeks earlier, and the fishing conditions are ripe for a repeat for the Tackle Warehouse Elite Qualifiers. Practice reports indicate St. Clair’s smallmouth population is in full summer pattern mode, ganging up in key offshore areas to feed on perch, gobie and even crawfish, replicating the conditions from last year’s Elite event.
Elation combined with frustration last year, as averaging (only) a 20-pound limit of smallmouth kept you out of the game to win. The entire field of 102 anglers weighed limits on the first two days. A 19-pound average on Day 1 turned into a 20-pound average the next day. Thirty-three bags weighing 20-plus pounds were caught on Day 1, while 48 more came across the scales on Day 2. Shane LeHew bested the Day 1 weights with 24-3, while Taku ito broke the 25-pound mark on Day 2.
After Day 3, Luke Palmer held a small lead on the strength of three limits over 22 pounds, giving him a total weight of 68-7. By then, a remarkable 4,916 pounds of bass were caught by the field.
The final day belonged to Cifuentes, whose 5-pound smallmouth assured victory in an area where he escaped the crowd in Anchor Bay. All week, Cifuentes cruised around a large area on the Canadian side of St. Clair, targeting smallmouth that had transitioned into their summertime patterns. There was a healthy population of perch in the area and, maybe more importantly, he had it almost entirely to himself. The majority of his weight was caught from 18 feet of water around cabbage grass with a drop shot.
More than half the field gravitated to massive Anchor Bay, favoring the biomass of smallmouth present in a productive strike zone stretching across the flats for miles. A combination of abundant forage and various aquatic grasses providing ambush points made time there well spent.
As for baits, all it takes is referencing last year’s Top Lures gallery to see the lineup of what could be thrown at the smallmouth this week. Notably, from start to finish that gallery featured drop shot and related finesse rig lures for targeting specific smallmouth while using forward-facing sonar. Ito even noted that he intentionally bypassed wasting casts on smallmouth he could see in the three-pound range, preferring instead to hunt down the biggest smallmouth in any given range of the sonar view.
As for the Open, the numbers of smallmouth caught are expected to be similar. And like last year, the difference makers will be in who can add a five-plus pound smallmouth each day to break the potential 20-pound daily average.
The outlier in the Open is access to Lake Erie and Lake Huron. The risk, and it can be heightened by wind, is the commute time that includes passage through the Detroit River. To reach the most productive areas in Erie limits fishing time to a few hours, or even less, to catch a limit surpassing what’s already available in Lake St. Clair.
Ranking first in the newly released Bassmaster 100 Best Bass Lakes is a 50-mile stretch of the St. Lawrence River. Lake St. Clair came in a respectable fourth place. Given those comparisons, you don’t need statistics to decide how the Open will play out.
