The Bandits tournament trail has finally arrived at North Dakota’s finest smallmouth waters on Lake Audubon, with a fair-weather forecast, made the special combination to bring the clubs largest event of the year so far with 19 teams making up 38 anglers! The field was large, and the competition was strong with many shooting for a chance at being the best angers on Audubon. What started as dead still calm waters and pristine conditions gradually turned to a gusty winds that challenged the anglers. But the anglers competing had great fishing and most of the field brought back full limits of healthy smallmouth at weigh in.

Coming in 1st place was team Colton Blomberg and John Lancaster with a heaping 18.82-pound bag! Right on their tails were Travis Thiele and Matt Filkins with 18.1-pounds and in third was team Bullinger bringing in a 17.3-pound bag. Biggest bass of the day was caught by Tanner Mallams with a whopper of a fish at 4.05 pounds! This places him in the Lake Audubon records with the 4th largest bass to be weighed in during a bandits tournament here.The top three teams shattered the July Average smallmouth size by nearly 1 pound at 3.61 pounds being the average size, the July average was 2.74 pounds/bass for perspective. A record day for the club on multiple levels!

As we do in every tournament, we end with a “Spill-the-beans” session where our top 3 teams share what they were doing during the day to be successful. What we all learned is that there were bass in the entire water column to be caught! From working shallow structure like weed lines and rocks to video-game fishing weed lines in deep (12-14 feet) waters, big bass were being found. Dropshots, Ned rigs, and Tubes were the dominate players, but good kickers were caught on ploppers and jerkbaits as well. Everyone has their favorite brand of bait, but one thing was common amongst all of the top teams, green pumpkin was a go-to color.

We will be back to Audubon at the end of September for the 15th Badlands Bass Bandits Classic! But before the classic we have one regular tournament left at Spiritwood Lake on August 29th. Keep tuned into the Badlands Bass Bandits Facebook and Instragram pages for more info about these events as they get closer!