Opening day bass tournaments

[b_cdot]

Should they get rid of opening day tournaments? When money is involved it likely promotes those to target bass before opening day for pre fishing. Just curious what ppl think of the timing of these tournaments.

[Tjames09]

I know it made fishing my lake very busy on the saturday and sunday. Tough to say really. People want their tournament season to start right away.

[grimsbylander]

Tournaments should start when the season starts and I don't believe for a second it promotes oos fishing.

[Lape0019]

I don't believe it has any affect on people deciding to fish before opener. The people who do it, already don't care about seasons so would have gone out regardless beforehand.

 

With that out of the way, with todays technology, I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few of these guys went out and cruised the lake with side imaging on looking for good places that would hold fish.

[AKRISONER]

From what I have heard the big tournament "pre-fishing" OOS involves a lot of just throwing hookless senkos to see if they can get a bite. Two points to this is that you cant target bass...and why would you wanna sting a bass if you plan on catching it tomorrow? I think if i was fishing a big tournament id fish hookless the day before too anyways?

 

if such is the case...who cares. The fish bite a senko and thats the end of it. I went and scoped the lake out friday we spent a heck of a lot of time just driving shorelines getting a feel for where the weeds were, finding rubble piles and visually spotting bass in shallow water areas.

[Terry]

When we did bass tournaments the one on opening day had rules you could not be on tourney waters with a rod on your boat others you could not be in that lake for one week before the tourney

 

The last think a tourney guy would want is to get caught breaking the rules and being banned from tourneys

[jimmer]

My thought on tourneys as a whole is that there are way too many being held in the kawarthas. I know this won't sit well with many, but the lakes get pounded, loons and their chicks get disturbed (for opening few weeks), weeds get chewed up. I am not against tournaments; I just feel they need to be regulated better and not have one on the tri-lakes every frigging weekend. Example: FLW decides to hold one this September on the same day that the Emerald Island Tournament has been scheduled for what? 40 years

Now, some of these tournaments are being organized privately, but many are series. Maybe it won't be so bad without Top Bass around, but another series will show up soon to replace it.

Opening this spring was early and many of the males are guarding fry and are still doing that as evidenced from my walk down to the dock this week. I do know that opening was off limits for a period of time years ago, but I think that all went out the window due to competing for weekends and available water.

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