Sturgeon Bay Ranked as the Top Bass Lake in the Nation by BassMaster
OutdoorHub 05.14.14
Door County’s Sturgeon Bay beat out the hottest fisheries in the U.S. to take BassMaster’s No. 1 spot for 2014! To create the rankings, BassMaster reached out to every state Department of Natural Resources agency in the country to find out which bodies of water are healthy and producing based on catch rates and shock data. Secondly, they surveyed 3,500 rabid bass anglers from every region of the U.S. to find out which lakes were red hot. Then, BassMaster surveyed all the B.A.S.S. Nation presidents and conservation directors from each state to get a sense of the accessibility and health of each fishery and to rate the overall experience of fishing any given body of water. And lastly, they asked the 500,000-plus Facebook fans of B.A.S.S. to chime in on which lakes deserve to be on this list! Once the master list was created, a panel of Elite Series pros, fishing-industry insiders, writers and traveling anglers came together to agree on the final rankings.
“When an 8.45-pound fish wins big bass — and that fish is a smallmouth — heads turn. That’s exactly what happened at a local tournament on this section of Lake Michigan last year. In that very same two-day tournament, it took 67.13 pounds to win (an average of almost 34 pounds per day. And the fishing here isn’t rocket science. The water is air-clear, and the smallmouth chomp just about anything you throw at them. Look on the expansive flats or the numerous ledges and cast your favorite smallmouth bait,”states Bassmaster Editor James Hall. “If you are looking for a destination to catch the biggest smallmouth of your life, Sturgeon Bay should be your next trip. If you want to catch a pile of smallies, Sturgeon Bay should be your next trip. Simply put, if you want to angle the best bass fishing waters that currently exist for size and numbers of fish, head to Wisconsin!”
To see the full list of the 100 Best Bass Lakes of 2014, go to www.bassmaster.com/news/introducing-100-best-bass-lakes-2014.
