BassTrakk: Day 1 by the numbers

St. Clair is special. We knew that. But never has it been more evident than what we saw yesterday. When the Elites last visited St. Clair in 2020, 16-4 was good enough for 60^th place on Day 1. But some like to throw an asterisk next to everything that season, perhaps two, with all the challenges of Covid and the upheaval in the sport of bass fishing at the time. 

So, let’s take a further look back to the 2017 season, when pandemics were make-believe on silver screens and Jason Christie beat nearly every household name in the business, at the time. In that tournament, 16-4 was good enough for 64th. Yesterday, Rick Clunn weighed 16 pounds of smallmouth. When the scales were unplugged for the night, Clunn landed in 95th. Unbelievable. 

There were an astonishing 998 bass entered into BassTrakk yesterday, more than half of those were over 3 pounds. But we’ll get into those bigger bites in a minute. Here’s a breakdown of those 998 catches by time of day. 

	Day 1
7:00 a.m. – 8:00 a.m.	92
8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.	187
9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.	187
10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.	141
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.	131
12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.	83
1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.	70
2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.	64
3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.	43

There were 585 bass over 3 pounds caught. That’s amazing in and of itself. But the 4-pound-plus fish are the ones that set anglers apart yesterday, so let’s take a look at those. There were 151 fish over 4 pounds logged into BassTrakk on Day 1. This is the breakdown by size. 

	Day 1
4-pounders	140
5-pounders	10
6-pounders	1

Let’s look at the breakdown of those 151 bass by time of day, so we can identify the best bite windows of Day 1 and try to use that data to determine the best big bite windows moving forward. 

	Day 1
7:00 a.m. – 8:00 a.m.	7
8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.	10
9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.	21
10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.	21
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.	26
12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.	17
1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.	19
2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.	21
3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.	9

World-renowned angler and trash talker Mark Zona mentioned multiple times on Bassmaster LIVE yesterday that the sun would need to come out for the bite to pick up. This happened mid-morning on parts of the fishery and improved on the whole as we approached noon and moved into the afternoon. 

Several anglers at weigh-in (and on LIVE this morning) also mentioned the bite picking up around 10 yesterday. This is all supported by the data we gathered through BassTrakk, reflecting a slower morning and then a hefty and steady production big bites until the staggered flights of anglers started to run back towards weigh-in around 3 o’clock. 

It’s likely that the point by Zona is more important than the time of day though, when forecasting the future bite windows. The sun is key, as Z pointed out, for these visual-feeding smallmouth to be able to track down baits from a greater distance. This decreases the need for pinpoint accuracy from the anglers attempting to pitch to bass seen on their forward-facing electronics. The sun came out early here on Day 2 this morning. And the fishing became red hot soon thereafter and hasn’t let up yet, with lunchtime fast approaching. So the sunshine appears to be more causation when looking at big bite windows, and the time of day is simply a correlation. 

A few storms are forecasted to push through just south of launch this afternoon, but a little cloud cover should be the only outcome for most of our anglers that are fishing on St. Clair. The forecast for tomorrow shows a small chance of scattered thunderstorms in the Anchor Bay area (where several of the top competitors are fishing), followed by cloudy skies. And then the clouds look to dissipate for Championship Sunday. 

All of this considered today is huge for the guys needing to climb out of a hole with a big bag here on Day 2. The bite will likely be a little tougher tomorrow, but be better again on Sunday when the weather improves and the boat pressure (from the Elite competition at least) dwindles. We will see.