Mike and Rob Burns brought in the only sack weighing over 20 pounds to win over $21,000.

“We targeted shallow water, in areas we thought there would be a shad spawn,” Mike explained. Using shad colored crank baits, they found the fish biting right away. “We caught a lot of fish first thing, several white bass as well as black bass,” he continued. They put two ‘unders’ in the boat, then Mike landed one over the slot.

“We decided to try a different spot, and find more decent unders to finish our limit.” Thirty minutes later, Rob caught another bass over the slot even bigger than the one before. “We decided to go ahead and bring those two in so they could be weighed and released.” Their biggest weighed 9.11 pounds, and the weight of their two big bass was 17 pounds.

“The bite slowed down quite a bit after that, but we stayed with the same pattern for the most part the rest of the day. We did try fishing deep some, and caught one, and we caught one on a frog as well. The rest was off that shad crank bait.”

At the end of the day their total weight was 21.17 lbs.

Second place winners David Horton & Preston Smith had a starting spot in mind, but when they got there it was just too windy to stay on it. “We headed to another area, a long cove with grass, that was more protected from the wind,” Preston said. “There were already seven other boats in there, but we squeezed on in and started fishing. We started catching bass immediately.”

They were using a white Spro popping frog. “We probably caught seven or eight in the slot, and another three that were under first thing off.” Around 8:30, David caught a small bass on a bed. Preston threw right back in the same spot and got a big bite. “She came up out of the water enough where I could see her huge mouth. I told David to get the net! There was a lot of grass wrapped around her, so it probably helped to keep her in the water and not have too much fight.” She weighed in at 8.60 pounds.

They culled three times before their day was done to a final weight of 15.38 lbs.

Rounding out the top 10 teams:
3rd $4,000 14.11 lbs William Thornton & Anthony Smith
4th $3,000+ 14.04 lbs Scott Simpson & Brandon Brewer
5th $2,500 9.84 lbs Gerald Guin & Andy Fearrand
6th $2,000 9.60 lbs Ladd Thompson & Logan Thompson Jr
7th $1,500 9.04 lbs Don Overstreet & Haden Sickles
8th $1,400 9.03 lbs Curt Culbertson & Brent Cantrell
9th $1,300+ 8.96 lbs Jason Riedel & Daniel Herring
10th $1,200 8.82 lbs Jeremy Zmolik & Nick Brown

Courtesy - Patty Lenderman, Bass Champs