Serious Angler Bailey Eigbrett Wins Bassmaster Kayak Champlain Event

Weather Shortens Tournament but Increases Eigbrett’s Confidence

These Bassmaster Kayak Series tournaments are two-day events, but potentially dangerous weather with high winds and strong thunderstorms was forecast for Sunday, the second day. By midday on Saturday, Bassmaster officials made the call to cancel day two and alerted anglers via Tourney X.

“I was still going to throttle down on the fish regardless,” the Serious Angler Podcast host said. “I did think I would have a better shot to win today, because I didn’t know what I was going to do tomorrow with the wind.”

Smallmouth Bass Strategy and FFS Pay Off on Lake Champlain

Leaning into his forward-facing sonar skills and his vast experience with smallmouth bass, he committed to a 300-yard stretch where he found big smallmouth feeding both high in the water column on schools of alewife and on the bottom in 50-to-60-feet feeding on perch.

Eigbrett reports he caught all of his fish on the Rapala Crush City Mooch Minnow rigged on either a 3/16-ounce Owner Range Roller for the alewife-eaters or a 3/8-ounce Cipher tungsten jig for the bottom-oriented fish.

“A lot of the damage was done on the 3/8-ounce,” Eigbrett said. “A lot of the time they were traveling very high up in the water column or they would be on bottom eating bait and start rising toward the surface. I would time the cast so that when they were rising, my bait fell to them.”

“I could tell on Live when they acknowledged my bait. I’d kill it, then start twitching it and reeling it back to the boat pretty quickly actually and make them chase it.”

“I started getting into some pretty good fish,” he said. “I was just doing figure 8’s with my MEGA Live 2 rigged on my Sniper Marine pole. I just tried to run into as many bass as I could and hoping for the big bites. When I caught my fourth 20-incher I knew I had a chance to do something special. I had never been able to catch 100 inches in a tournament, so it was pretty dang cool to do it in this event.”

Eigbrett is One to Watch

With his media company and fishing podcast gaining momentum every day, and now a major Bassmaster Kayak Series win under his belt, Bailey Eigbrett is proving himself to be one Serious Angler.

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