“The Old Minnow Bucket” 2011

It was the kind of day where 30-mile-an-hour winds were making an already choppy body of water covered with whitecaps even rougher. The sort of day where if you were lucky enough to find fish, you had to do battle with the wind.  To make it more intense, the tournament that the IU fishing team found themselves in was pitted against their bitter rival, Purdue.

“The Old Minnow Bucket” is the oldest intercollegiate fishing tournament in the nation, dating back to time itself…or at least back to the mid-nineties. Although both teams are very civil towards one another, and many anglers have more than one friend on the other team, during the tournament we could cut the tension with a knife.

Many of the IU team members had gone up the day before the tournament to pre-fish, and had found that Lake Waveland seemed to be a difficult lake to fish in the fall, despite its small size. There was not  a lot of typical cover to fish, no long points, no stumps to pitch to, and only a few lay downs. Only a few people caught fish in practice, but by the time tournament day rolled around, the wind had moved the bait, and in turn moved the bass from the spots where IU had found them. The majority of the fish caught during competition came on white jigs and plastics that were fished on the bottom, around channel swings, and the few brush piles in the lake.

Club President, Zack Wojcowicz had mastered the bottom bouncing technique by the end of the day, catching his five fish limit on a white Zoom Speed Craw, off of a brush pile near the channel.

At the end of the day, IU reigned supreme by almost doubling the weight of fish that Purdue brought in. At the end of the weigh-in, IU had managed to bring in just over 25 pounds, while Purdue weight just over 13 pounds of fish.

The Old Minnow Bucket will be home in Bloomington for at least a year, right where it belongs.