Good weekend on Shoal Lake

Two bass tournaments and a walleye tournament took place across Sunset Country over the past weekend and despite some strong winds on Saturday, it was a pretty nice weekend to be in the boat.
My pal, Karl Engstrom, and I teamed for the Shoal Lake Bass Classic and ended up having a couple of pretty good days en route to winning the tournament.
Our limits of 16.30 and 16.00 gave us a total of 32.30 pounds, which was enough to edge the two teams that tied for second–John Frost/Jamie Bruce and Jayden Symonds/Ian Waterer, who each had 31.70.
The weights were down a little bit from recent years, likely as a result of the big wind that moved the fish around a little bit on Saturday.
The biggest factor in our success was simply having a lot of spots to fish. We caught one here, one there over the weekend and just kept hitting places that have been good over the past 20 years that I’ve fished on Shoal Lake.
We weighed eight smallmouths and two largemouths over the weekend and caught fish on a variety of baits, including hair jigs, topwaters, and wacky worms.
A big thanks to Randy Paishk and Vernon Fair, who run the tournament every year as well as fish in it! It is a great lake to have tournaments on because it’s big and has a lot of diversity as far as types of places to fish.
Meanwhile, the annual “Castin’ For Cash” bass tournament took place Friday and Saturday out of Lake Despair Lodge and it was the veteran team of Don Copenace and Greg Swire that took home the trophy with a two-day total of 29.19 pounds to edge Mike Wilson and Zack McBride (28.29).
Bryan Gustafson and Brian White were third (26.53).
The wind on Saturday wreaked some havoc on the Despair chain of lakes because the weights were down significantly on Day 2 after a solid first day.
This is a really fun chain of lakes to fish on and had these two bass tournaments not been on the same weekend, I would have loved to fish at Lake Despair. I have a lot of good memories from there over the years.
Back up in Kenora, the fourth-annual Kenora Walleye Open took place on Lake of the Woods. Some 125 teams competed for the $30,000 first-place prize, which went to the Manitoba team of Mike Davey and Josh Haisell, who had a two-day total of 27.88 pounds to edge out the Dryden team of John and Susan Butts (27.42).
The Manitoba team of Paul Janzen and Justin Hebert were a close third (27.37).
The format for this walleye tournament is such that teams bring in one big fish each day (over 23 inches) and three fish under 18 inches. If an “over” fish is not caught, a team can bring in four “under” fish but to place in the money, you need to have some solid “over” fish in your bag.
There were some monster walleyes brought to the scales, including a 10.85-pounder that was the biggest of the weekend.
It is quiet on the tournament front this week but things get cranked back up again next week with the Fort Frances Canadian Bass Championships on Rainy Lake and the Bronzeback Open on Lake of the Woods both taking place.
Some spots still remain open for the FFCBC for anglers interested in signing up.
I have spent the week in Fort Frances for this event since 2000 and it always is one of my favourite weeks of the entire summer.