Lake Minnetonka, Minnesota Bass Fishing Report

This past weekend is was finally time to take a break from the walleyes and instead chase some large mouth bass out on Lake Minnetonka. Most of the fish that I caught were post spawn. There were a few that were still on their beds spawning, but Thursday and Friday were not the ideal days weather wise for looking for shallow bass. Especially when many bas on Tonka bed in 6-8′. I spent most of my time working crankbaits and jig worms on outside weedlines and stickworms and swim jigs on inside weedlines. No one pattern was better than any other and the fishing was rather average. With a combination of the cooler spring and the chemicals put into the lake, the weeds were not as usual making the fish seem to be a bit more scattered.

Saturday was the 29th annual Minnetonka Classic. My partner Scott and I have fished it for quite a while with some respectable finishes. We had a middle of the pack draw out of the 103 boats and were lucky enough to be able to get on our desired starting spot. We started by throwing crankbaits looking for active fish. The first fish was a smaller pike, but then Scotty went on on run with the bass while I played net and cull man. I finally managed to boat a couple myself and we were off to a good start with a limit in less than 30 minutes with a 4lb+ as a bonus.

After about an hour the bite slowed and it was time to move. Our second spot was an inside weedline that was loaded with 2.5 to 3lb fish. These fish would agressively hit Outkast Stickworms Texas-rigged weightless or on a Money Jig. We were able to cull up quite a bit here and by 10am we felt pretty confident that we had enough weight to cash a check. We went looking for some big fish up shallow but did not have any luck so we decided to try our starting spot again. Good thing we did as we boated our big fish for the day at 4.74lb. We spent the rest of the afternoon looking for a couple big girls but didn’t quite find them. We ended up weighinh 25.58lb and placed 3rd. Congrats to Brad Cline and Jeff Bosshardt on a great win and Steve Lee and John Bird for yet another great finish in this event.