FLW preview: Champlain dreams hinge on spawn, weather

Wal-Mart FLW Tour Forrest Wood Open, Lake Champlain, June 23-26

One thing is certain about this week’s Wal-Mart FLW Tour event at Lake Champlain: If the conditions permit, everybody will be catching fish.

Another certainty: Every ounce of bass will matter.

But that’s where the predictions end for this year’s Forrest Wood Open on big, bad Lake Champlain because, perhaps more than anywhere else, this is a lake where anyone can win. It’s sheer size and enormous population of both largemouth and smallmouth bass mean that anglers can catch them pretty much anywhere they want, anyhow they want.

Mix in a $1.25 million total purse – $200,000 for the pro winner and $40,000 for the co-angler winner – the top 48 trying to make the championship, plus an Angler of the Year race about to make history and you have the ingredients for a knockdown, drag-out FLW slugfest.

Lake Champlain facts

With 587 miles of shoreline and a maximum depth of 400 feet, Lake Champlain represents the largest lake FLW anglers will visit on the tour this year. Meandering along the border of New York and Vermont, Lake Champlain boasts more than 70 islands and some of the most beautiful scenery in the United States, featuring impressive vistas encompassing the Adirondacks, Green Mountains and Taconic Mountains as well as the Champlain and Vermont valleys.

Lake Champlain flows from Whitehall, N.Y., north across the U.S.-Canadian border to its outlet at the Richelieu River in Quebec, where it eventually drains into the Atlantic Ocean at the Gulf of the St. Lawrence River. Although Lake Champlain is long – covering more than 100 miles from north to south – the lake is relatively narrow, measuring only 12 miles at its widest point. Champlain, which has an average depth of 64 feet, can be broken down into five distinct segments (from north to south): Missisquoi Bay, Inland Sea, Malletts Bay, Main Lake and South Lake.

Postspawn bass could be key

Early in practice, some pros seemed to be having trouble pinpointing what stage of the spawn the good bass are in at Champlain. In 2002, the pros who went sight-fishing for bigger bass, like that year’s runner-up Dean Rojas, were the ones who came out ahead.

“I’m still trying to figure them out,” Rojas said Monday. “It’s different than it was two years ago. The water temperature’s warmer, about 5 to 7 degrees. There are some fish on the beds, but not enough really to play a key role this week.”

Scott Martin, fourth place in 2002, agreed: “There are some small fish on the beds, but the quality fish are pretty much done spawning.”

Despite the record number of fish brought in by FLW pros last time at Champlain, a few pros think this year’s event will be an even bigger blockbuster in terms in weight. Most of the big bass are postspawn – and they’re looking for food.

“I think smallmouths are going to play a little more of a role this year simply because we’re a little bit further into the spawn. The big fish are off the beds and they’re hungry,” Rojas said.

“I think we’re going to have even heavier weights this time,” Martin said. “The key will be catching 17 or 17 1/2 pounds per day and not having any dead fish.”

While smallies could play a bigger role, Martin thinks it will again take big largemouths to win the event. He found most of his bigger largemouths have come from the southern half of the lake.

“You can draw a line at Westport (N.Y.) and from there to the south end is where you’ll find the dominant largemouth bite,” he said. “Everyone gets so excited about the smallmouth bite here – and they should – but the tournament can pretty much be won with largemouths.”

Still, at over 435 square miles of surface water, Champlain is so huge that it offers an endless array of bass cover and fishing possibilities on any part of the lake.

“At over a hundred miles long, there’s so much water that you can fish wherever you want and however you want to fish,” Rojas said. “This lake is absolutely phenomenal.”

“The good thing is that this lake is big and the whole lake fishes well,” Martin said. “You do need to find a lot of spots, but that’s easy since it’s not going to have a whole lot of fishing pressure.”

That in mind, finding a key lure might be an exercise in redundancy. Several pros listed a variety of baits ranging from worms, tubes and flukes to Carolina rigs, jerkbaits and jigs. But, rest assured, the hundreds upon hundreds of bass to cross the scales this week will be caught on almost as many baits.

“I’ve been throwing a little bit of everything,” Clark Wendlandt said.

The stakes

With so many fishing opportunities, Lake Champlain is one of the more ideal spots to host the last regular-season FLW event of the year. Anglers on the bubble to qualify for the championship are going to have to bring their A-game if they want to finish in the top 48 in the year-end standings. With most of the field bringing in limits, just an ounce or two a day will jostle people around the leaderboard a very good deal.

“It’s kind of nerve-wracking,” said Wendlandt, who sits comfortably ranked fifth. “If you have just one mediocre day, you could drop a hundred spots (in the results). Thirteen or 14 pounds is just not catching them here.”

Wendlandt, a two-time FLW Angler of the Year, is also aware of Champlain’s ability to impact the coveted standings-title race. Two years ago, Jay Yelas launched a big comeback AOY win here after it seemed that Kevin VanDam had locked the title up. But one off day put VanDam on the outside looking in.

This year, Shinichi Fukae is carrying another strong lead into the event (908 points) and would make history as the first Japanese pro – an FLW rookie, no less – to win the tour’s AOY title. But Wendlandt, sitting 75 points behind Fukae, knows that anything can happen at Champlain.

“A guy could easily change six or seven spots in the standings just because of where we’re at,” Wendlandt said. “I’d rather be ahead, but if I was ahead here, I’d be nervous. It’s going to be a slugfest, I guarantee it.”

Previous FLW Lake Champlain winner

2002 – Sam Newby, Pocola, Okla.

Staff editor Gary Mortenson contribited to this report.