Matt Peters Wins Lake Mille Lacs Champions Tour Open with 24 lb 4 oz
Zimmerman, MN – Classic Bass (ClassicBass.com), a leader in providing relevant and timely information for tournament bass anglers held its second Champions Tour Open event of the 2018 season on Saturday, July 21st, on Lake Mille Lacs.
Mother Nature provided the anglers with a moderate walleye chop for fishing, with a north wind of 5 to 10 miles per hour, this coupled with overcast conditions and muddy, high water, made the bite for the twenty seven competitors on the tougher side. But the Champions Tour Open anglers looked for ways to target some of Mille Lacs shallow water largemouth and docks for smallmouth.
The thirty Champions Tour Anglers headed out on to Lake Mille Lacs with Minnesota High School bass club anglers serving as the boat officials. All of the anglers and boat officials were treated to a wonderful and excellent experience at the host site of Izatys Resort.
Matt Peters, who has a second and fourth place finish on Lake Mille Lacs in his two previous Champions Tour events, finally got the monkey off his back and claimed the top spot. Peters, also won the Wenzels Farm Comeback Award, by increasing his catch by 12 lb 10 oz from the end of the first half to second half, relied on dragging a big football head jig on main lake gravel bars to garner his days catch.
To learn more about the winning baits and strategy, you can view this video recap:
Wisconsin smallmouth ace, Jason Stengel was leading the first half of the day, but fell to Peter’s by a mere ten ounces in the end! Jason relied on a variety of finesse plastics for getting the finicky smallmouth to bite and assemble his 23 lb 10 oz catch.
Rounding out the top-six Champions Tour anglers that punched their ticket to the 2018 Champions Tour Championship, where they will be fishing against thirty anglers, where the winner will walk away with a brand new Skeeter Boats/Yamaha Outboards package, valued at over $45,000! The location of the Championship will be announced following the August 7th Tour event, included:
2nd – Jason Stengel: 23 lb 10 oz
3rd – Arnold Helgerson: 19 lb 9 oz
4th – Matt Pasma: 19 lb 0 oz
5th – Noah Schultz: 17 lb 9 oz
6th – Matt Gilbertson: 16 lb 11 oz
The winner of the Big Bass Award presented by YETI was Matt Gilbertson with a 5 lb 2 oz smallmouth.
The remaining event of the 2018 Champions Tour season presented by Skeeter Boats and Yamaha Outboards will be on August 7th , on Lake Minnetonka, hosted by Lord Fletcher’s.
The Classic Bass Champions Tour will again be streaming live results, posting fish catches and fishing techniques throughout the day as competitors aim to catch as many legal bass as possible. Each angler is paired with a boat official who will weigh and record every catch into the new Classic Bass Champions Tour scoring system. At no time will any bass be placed in the boat’s livewells and brought to a weigh-in.
Classic Bass’s primary objective is to provide bass fisherman with beneficial and current bass fishing information, and this goal will now be boosted by the Champions Tour, as results can be followed real time via ClassicBass.com and on social media. Competing anglers will also be providing Classic Bass with helpful fishing information on the lake they are fishing, along with the techniques and lures they are using.
About Classic Bass:
Since 1994, Classic Bass’s mission is to support bass tournament anglers of all skill levels with access to comprehensive information on tournaments, techniques, results and products. In addition, Classic Bass provides person-to-person boat sales and industry leading news.
