Kevin VanDam won this tournament a year ago with 90 pounds, 3 ounces. The greatest tournament bass angler of all time will not be fishing in the 12-man final today. He finished 36th. But the man who has won 25 B.A.S.S. tournaments, 4 Bassmaster Classics and 7 Angler of the Year titles knows a special event when he sees one.
“This doesn’t happen very often,” VanDam said on-stage Saturday. “This is a historic event. This is the best smallmouth tournament ever in the history of man here in Waddington this week.”
In a good smallmouth bass fishery, a five-bass limit of 20 pounds will put you near the top of the leaderboard. In three days on the St. Lawrence River, there were 107 bags weighing at least 20 pounds, topped by Matt Lee’s 27-12 on Thursday.
The weigh-in scales have taken a beating. Nearly 2 ½ tons of almost exclusively smallmouth bass have been weighed over three days – 4,883 pounds, 8 ounces, to be exact. The 1,275 bass weighed averaged 3.83 pounds.
It took an average of 19-pounds-plus the first two days to make the Top 50 cut. It took almost 22 pounds a day to make the Top 12 cut. That doesn’t happen often on a good largemouth fishery. As VanDam noted, it’s history-making on a smallmouth fishery.
How about a 30-pound limit and a 100-pound winning weight on Sunday? Those are about the only feats left unaccomplished on the St. Lawrence River this week. While unlikely, neither is outside the realm of possibility today.