Chautauqua Lake Tournament
On Saturday, October 8, the ESF Bass Team sent 4 teams to compete in the final NYBassYouth Collegiate Trail event of the year on Chautauqua Lake, NY. Cold and heavy rains the day before muddied the lake, but the ESF Bass Team still had two teams finish in the top 5 of the event, with Matt Chapell (Junior) and Tyler Ossen (Freshman) claiming 3rd place and the team of Anthony Rice (M.S.) / Lauren Roberts (Junior) taking 4th.
Chapell and Ossen caught just one weighable fish all day, but their 2 pounder was enough to take third on what was an incredibly tough day of fishing. "We started the day fishing old waypoints, trying to hit deeper drop offs. We had talked about where to fish in our team meeting, so we ran through those pretty quickly," Ossen said. When that didn't work, the team transitioned shallow. "I caught that smallmouth literally the first time I had picked up the bladed jig all day. From then on out we stayed shallow and tried to expand on that," said Chapell. While they weren't able to find any more, their one fish was enough for some very valuable team of the year points.
Rice and Roberts also only caught one weighable fish, though that one fish made the difference in a field in which only one limit was caught. "We started off fishing the stuff we had gone over the night before, but the wind started blowing and we could tell the fish we were seeing on our electronics just weren't going to bite," Rice noted. Scrapping their original plan of fishing deep, the team started fishing main-lake points in hopes of salvaging the day. "I caught that one on a jig off of a lay-down on a really obvious point. We tried to replicate it, but when we came back there were 3 boats fishing that spot," Roberts said.
The teams of Nick Sanderson (Junior) / Dominic Begier (Sophomore) and Alex Allen (Senior) / Alyvia Nazak (Junior) were unable to catch a keeper fish through the tournament day. "It's not a good feeling going out on your home lake and zeroing. The lake was fishing differently than I've ever seen it before. Nick and I got spun out trying to fish history and we just never settled in," Begier said. "It was tough seeing all of the schools of bait on Livescope and they just had nothing on them. The day was definitely a learning experience," Allen lamented. "We definitely waited too long to move shallow and realize that the deep bite just wasn't happening," Nazak said.
The team will look to close out the season by hosting the annual Autism Awareness Fundraiser tournament on October 15 on Onondaga Lake, with proceeds benefiting My Little Buddy's Boat, a charity dedicated to getting children affected by autism on the water.