NH BASS Nation Open Team Trail Event #1

Lake Winnipesaukee | May 1, 2022
Moultonborough, NH

Despite fickle New England weather, frigid nights, cold fronts, crippling inflation, sky rocketing gas prices and the BA2 subvariant, nothing could quell the enthusiasm of the 46 teams who showed up for NH Bass Nation’s first open team trail event on Lake Winnipesaukee launching out of Lee’s Mills in Moultonborough, New Hampshire.  Presented by title sponsors Thayer’s Marine and Triton Boats, this “double down” event was co-hosted with the NH Basscasters and gave anglers the opportunity to compete in two tournaments with a shared weigh-in. Tournament registration was done online, and Facebook Live was used the night before the tournament to announce send-off boat order and winners of our raffle prize drawings.

We want to thank the town of Moultonborough for letting us use their facilities for this event. Even though the State’s Landing ramp was closed due to construction, launching and parking went smoothly with the help of our state team members. We also want to give a shout out to Jeremy Arnold for helping with the morning shuttle. Thanks!

The day before the tournament, we were greeted by another cold night of 37 degrees; however, forecast called for a warm partly sunny day which seemed like a first in forever, and this time, the weatherman was right. The day gradually warmed up to almost 70 degrees in the afternoon and turned out to be one of the nicest days of the year so far. With sunny skies and light wind, teams were able to cover the whole lake with mother nature’s built-in air conditioning for their ride. The water temperature on the big lake remained somewhat cold from 47-54 degrees from main lake to back coves.

As it turned out, smallmouths were eager to bite and the largemouth fishermen were very disappointed at the end of the day.  At weigh-in, most anglers agreed that smallmouth were biting and largemouth for some reason got the lock jaws today. Traditional for New England spring tournaments, you need at least a couple largemouth kickers, if not all four in your bag, to finish on top and that held true to an extent for the top few teams while only a handful of largemouth were weighed in for the entire tournament. Somewhat surprising but that’s fishing, always expect the unexpected. Complete result can be found here.

Team Recaps

1st – Chris Bolduc/Jason Faro   13.72 mixed bag with a 4.39 LM kicker

“We had a tournament yesterday, we struggled all day, came in with maybe 11 lbs, we didn’t weigh in. This morning when we fished completely different water, we fished 2-5 ft and as much wood as we can find and finish off with some smallmouth, missed a couple of fish, we ended up with two largemouths and two smallmouths, but ended up having two fish about four lbs or so. We probably caught seven fish or so all day on jigs and jerk bait.”

Chris and Jason drew boat #1 and came in the winner, both were happily surprised at the end of the day, they even got the lunker largemouth on the Basscaster’s side. “You know what makes me nervous? I think we used up all our luck in one day for the next 10 years. “

“Thanks so much. I still had no idea we even won until we were pulled out and driving down the dirt road, LOL. I saw you giving Chris an envelope but figured it was for 6th place!”

2nd – Rob Messenger / John Levesque   13.59

“We fished smallmouth in the morning for about an hour and 15 minutes had a great bag and headed out to fish for some largemouth and just couldn’t get it done with the largemouth. We covered a lot of area, traveled 75-80 miles, we caught basically 5-6 smallmouth in the morning and then a couple of real small largemouth, we caught our fish in 15 ft range and mostly on silver buddy”.

3rd – Steve Gillis / James Gillis   13.16 with lunker largemouth of the day 5.58

“We pulled up on a little stretch that we figure we can get a big bite, kind of secondary point deal and rolled up with the jig just threw it out there and felt a thump, set on him, was about middle of the day. We probably caught 8-9 fish all day. This morning we went for largemouth and it wasn’t happening so we moved off and went got our smallmouth but that one big fish put us over the top, not only got us into the money but also got us the lunker largemouth. Wished we had doubled down”.

James made the drive down from Clarkson U. upstate NY just so he could fish this event with his dad. Treasure this precious moment and put it into memory bank guys. Great job.

4th – John Fortier / John Foster   13.03

Our president declined comment!!!

This is from J. Fortier

“We caught our fish in 15-20 ft of water, culled a few times today, just got the right bites today, I guess. Caught them in sprits, an hour of dead time and back on them again. We had a real nice cull at the end of the day with about an hour to go for about one lb or so”, obviously not where we saw you, “Oh, god no, we bail out of where we saw you this morning and we started hitting places because we had one two and a quarter fish that we need to get rid of, and hit all the you know we should be getting hit spots, and nothing, nothing, nothing, and we went to a spot that I caught some last weekend but they were small but we did get a 3.25 fish there. We got a limit pretty quick this morning, had a big one right off the bat, then I figured I wanted to go over to fish that spot over there, but something happened and we were dubbing around and looked up there were two boats on that spot (yours truly), but it was all good”.

5th – Jeff Perron / Peter Owen   12.83

“Our day was absolutely fantastic, we got our limit in 15-20 minutes and we were culling right away”, said Jeff

Pete: “we got all our smallmouth like in the first hour and went six hours for largemouth but not much and ended on some smallmouth but couldn’t cull up any. We caught quite a bit of fish in the first hour in 20-25ft of water. We stayed pretty much in one area most of the day. Good day”.

6th - Brad Dekraai / Jeff Moore   12.78 with lunker smallmouth 4.05

“Today was a struggle, we started out searching for largemouth, spent half of the day doing that and then we moved out try to find some smallmouth, we were lucky enough to get a few decent bites, we had FOUR bites all day and got paid!  We caught them 18-20 ft deep”.

This prove that you only need the right four bites, great job.

7th – Joe Burchill/Tim Dube   12.34

“Laugh, laugh, it was a huge struggle, went looking for green fish most of the day, hopped out of one green fish area and got a limit of smallmouth and that’s all we got, six smallmouth and culled twice”.

Dream team???

We want to thank all our sponsors from the national, state and local level for their support. We also want to thank all the angler for coming out to support NH Bass Nation. 20% of the proceed will fund the NH State Team for their Regionals and Nationals. Next Open is July 10th on Winnipesaukee out of West Alton Marina, come join us for the chance to win some great prizes, Humminbird team of the year award with great payout and to qualify for the Bassmaster Team Championship 2022.