Day 1 of the Dakota Lithium Bassmaster Elite at Lake Champlain was pretty impressive. When the Elites were here a month earlier in 2021, there were 9 bags over 20 pounds weighed in on Day 1 and 18-0 was good enough for 36th. Yesterday, there were 17 bags over 20 pounds weighed in and 18-0 had Scott Martin and Hanck Cherry tied and straddling the Top 50 cutline. An impressive day of fishing no doubt.
The anglers attribute this rise in weights to the placement on the calendar of this event. A month ago, the fish would have been beaten up from the spawning process and scattered. Now, they’ve had time to feed up, group up and recover. The fish are roaming around in small pods and giant schools chasing baitfish, thus each bass is a half-pound heavier on average than it would have been a month ago.
Let’s look at the numbers now that we gathered through BassTrakk to see if we can identify the better bite windows. There were 498 catches entered into BassTrakk on Day 1. Here they are by time of day.
| Day 1 | |
| 7:00 a.m. – 8:00 a.m. | 41 |
| 8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. | 101 |
| 9 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. | 100 |
| 10 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. | 75 |
| 11 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. | 53 |
| 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. | 42 |
| 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. | 43 |
| 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. | 31 |
| 3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. | 12 |
| Total | 498 |
It’s pretty easy to see that the morning bite was best. And these numbers definitely support what we saw while watching the LIVE coverage yesterday. The action was hot and heavy right out of the gate, due to favorable conditions. The morning began with a light breeze and sunny skies. The wind had the bass active and the sun made it easy for the visual feeding smallmouth to see the baits. The light wind also made it much easier for the anglers to chase and lock onto their quarry with their electronics.
The wind began to pick up however around 10 a.m. The clouds rolled in as well. And this combination devastated the bite. There were twice as many fish logged into BassTrakk during the 8 and 9 o’clock hours as compared to most any other hour of the day.
Now, we do have to take into consideration that the anglers likely didn’t log every small fish catch once they got their limits. So, let’s look at the bass logged over 3 pounds to get a better idea about when the big bites came, and how much the wind really affected things.
There were 308 bass over 3 pounds logged into BassTrakk on Day 1. Here’s the breakdown by size.
| | Day 1 |
| 3-pounders | 224 |
| 4-pounders | 82 |
| 5-pounders | 2 |
And here’s the breakdown of those better fish by time of day.
| Day 1 | |
| 7:00 a.m. – 8:00 a.m. | 22 |
| 8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. | 54 |
| 9 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. | 48 |
| 10 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. | 50 |
| 11 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. | 35 |
| 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. | 32 |
| 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. | 32 |
| 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. | 25 |
| 3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. | 10 |
| Total | 308 |
We can again see that the morning bite was by far the strongest, with solid production between 8 and 11 a.m. The drop-off certainly wasn’t as dramatic though, when looking at just these better bites. There was roughly a 30%-40% decrease in big bites later in the day, as compared to a 50%-60% decline when looking at the overall fish catch numbers. This can again most likely be attributed to the anglers tossing small fish back without entering them into BassTrakk later in the day, knowing they wouldn’t cull and thus would not affect their bottom line.
With Day 2 being postponed due to dangerous weather conditions, it’ll be interesting to see how Saturday plays out with the full field competing. The winds are forecasted to subside, with a 5 to 10 mph out of the west/southwest. But clouds and rain will linger. This will no doubt affect the fishing. But big bass and big bags will still be caught.
Several of the top contenders are chasing huge schools of smallmouth out in 20- to 50- feet of water. There is no way to catch all of these fish, so plenty of 18- to 20-pound bags are swimming around out there still. The test will be to see who can hit them on the head and get them into the boat.
