The field was cut to the Top 50 on Day 3, sending 52 anglers down the road to ready themselves for next week’s St. Lawrence River Elite. When looking at the BassTrakk data, it’s important to keep this smaller field size in mind, so we can better compare the numbers from day to day.
There were 498 bass entered into BassTrakk by 102 anglers on Day 1, 535 by the full field on Day 2. Then there were 291 entered by the Top 50 on Day 3. Doubling that number to 582 for easy math, the fishing appears to have been a little better on Day 3, continuing to improve throughout the week.
Here’s the breakdown by time of day of those catches.
| Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | |
| 7:00 a.m. – 8:00 a.m. | 41 | 53 | 37 |
| 8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. | 101 | 106 | 73 |
| 9 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. | 100 | 105 | 52 |
| 10 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. | 75 | 62 | 47 |
| 11 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. | 53 | 59 | 26 |
| 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. | 42 | 46 | 31 |
| 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. | 43 | 56 | 23 |
| 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. | 31 | 31 | 2 |
| 3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. | 12 | 17 | N/A |
| Total | 498 | 535 | 291 |
To compare the Day 3 column to the first two, we can again simply double that number in the third column. Doing so, it’s apparent the morning bite was far better on Day 3 than the previous two days. Then things kind of stymied around 11 a.m. and stayed relatively consistent throughout the rest of the day.
Let’s look at the better fish, those over 3-pounds, to see if we can hone in on the best big bite window of the day. There were 192 bass over 3 pounds entered into BassTrakk on Day 3. Here’s the breakdown of those fish by size.
| | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 |
| 3-pounders | 224 | 259 | 129 |
| 4-pounders | 82 | 92 | 62 |
| 5-pounders | 2 | 2 | 1 |
And here’s the breakdown of those better fish by time of day.
| Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | |
| 7:00 a.m. – 8:00 a.m. | 22 | 21 | 19 |
| 8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. | 54 | 61 | 40 |
| 9 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. | 48 | 67 | 33 |
| 10 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. | 50 | 39 | 34 |
| 11 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. | 35 | 43 | 20 |
| 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. | 32 | 35 | 26 |
| 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. | 32 | 42 | 18 |
| 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. | 25 | 28 | 2 |
| 3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. | 10 | 17 | N/A |
| Total | 308 | 353 | 192 |
Again, doubling the Day 3 numbers to come closer to comparing apples to apples, the morning bite between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m. was stronger than we’ve seen it all week. It’s hard to really put a finger on exactly why that was. The sun was high and the wind was light all day yesterday, ideal conditions for the bass to bite later in the day. But, for some reason, the fish bit best in the morning.
Worth noting too this week is the percentage of bass over 3 pounds entered into BassTrakk. Over 64% of the bass entered Days 1 through 3 were over 3 pounds. This backs up the impressive numbers we saw from our daily weigh-ins, with the average weight of a bass weighed this week being 3.55 pounds.
