Tournament News Powered By Lake Drive Marine
Wednesday, November 26, 2025
Monday, November 24, 2025
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By Lee Duracz
Chilly Start to Polar Bear Open
The boats arrived at the ramp with frost on the ground and ice skimmed over the condo channel behind the parking lot at Eagle Lake near Edwardsburg.
The early morning temperature was 20 degrees and the heavy winter clothing was put on by all the competitors. Thank God for the invention of four wheel drive, as it didn’t take long for the ramp to get icy, although nobody really struggled getting in or out. (The quality of the ramp is not great, I wish the MI DNR would push harder to get the new access completed.)
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By Lee Duracz
Winners ($250) Scott Sizemore and Dan Powell
The first stop of the Polar Bear Circuit on Austin Lake near Kalamazoo started out as a beautiful fall day that turned into a four-season nightmare by noon.
When we launched boats, we could see the sunrise coming up under partly cloudy skies with a light east breeze, making the 40-degree air temp very manageable. The graphs read 44 degrees water temp and the water clarity was perfect.
Just about when we thought we were going to escape the grim forecast for the day, noon rolled around and the sky turned a wintery gray, making it look like the sun had just set. The wind switched north for a while, and we started to see flashes in the distance accompanied by deep rumbles of thunder. The deep rumbles turned to loud hard cracks, the wind pushed the torrential rains into our faces, and the lines were coming off the water from the static electricity in the air. Remarkably, only three boats left early, and we all were saying a quick prayer after a couple loud thunder cracks.
Winners ($250) Scott Sizemore and Dan Powell hunkered down in a small area that had some cover which they knew was holding fish and grinded out five solid bass for 14.66 pounds.
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B.A.S.S. Report
Bassmaster Postseason Scheduled For North Georgia In 2018
For the first time in its five-year existence, the Toyota Bassmaster Angler of the Year Championship will be held below the Mason-Dixon Line - on Lake Chatuge on the Georgia/North Carolina border, B.A.S.S. announced today.
The championship will be held Sept. 20-23, 2018, and will feature the 50 top-ranked Bassmaster Elite Series anglers, based on Angler of the Year points earned during the nine-event Elite season, said Bruce Akin, CEO of B.A.S.S.
Akin also revealed that the 2018 Classic Bracket tournament will be held Oct. 23-26, also in northern Georgia, at 3,200-acre Carters Lake near Ellijay.
Earlier today, Akin announced that the 2018 Toyota Bassmaster Texas Fest tournament, one of the nine regular-season events of the Bassmaster Elite Series, will be held May 17-20 on Lake Travis near Austin, Texas.
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By Lee Duracz
The Birth of the Polar Bear Opens
A couple years ago my good buddy and fishing partner, Jeremy Bunnell, asked me to fish Bob Evans’ tournament on Klinger Lake the Saturday after thanksgiving. This tournament had been going on for years and I had just heard about it from him.
I usually started to put my bass rods down by the 1st week of November and started to switch over to walleye, lake trout, steelhead or various panfish and mostly with live bait. It wasn’t that I stopped liking to bass fish at that time, it was just extremely hard for me to get good numbers of quality bass that time of year. Knowing this tournament was coming up, I was trying to prepare myself on how to catch fish on a blade bait, one of the best baits to catch bass when the temperatures drop below 50 degrees.
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Chad Lovell and Keith Green
Chad Lovell and Keith Green (Dowagiac, Mich.) had a limit of four keeper smallmouth weighing 13.62 pounds to win the Casting Couples Open on the St. Joseph River at Benton Harbor last weekend.
The tournament rules limited anglers to a four-fish limit. There were five, 4-pound smallmouth weighed in during the tournament.
Lovell and Green used crankbaits to earn them $210.
John Gipson Jr. (Battleground, Ind.) and Tom Noe (Benton Harbor)
John Gipson Jr. (Battleground, Ind.) and Tom Noe (Benton Harbor) were second ($100) with 12.55 pounds caught on A-rigs and tubes.