Susie Kockerscheidt photo
Mark Kulik with the monster 7.2-pounder he hauled in with teammate Dave Kennedy.
Georgina
November 02, 2007 03:55 PM
By: Wil Wegman
The weigh-in drama at Sibbald Point Provincial Park could not have been more intense. Team after team drove in front of the stage with their bass boats in tow showing off their catch to the crowd of spectators.
Leading the bass tournament with an impressive 28.6 pounds right up until the very end was Peter Savoia and Gaspare Constible. Facts of Fishing star and MC Dave Mercer reported excitedly that there was only one more team to weigh in. They were two-time winners of this event and were always a team to watch out for.
Could they topple 28.6 pounds to win or even break the magic 30 pound barrier?
One by one, Bob Formosa and Jayson Saliba pulled their five bass out of the livewell. Each gargantuan smallmouth appeared to get bigger and bigger and the crowd roared their approval.
Their last bass was pulled out of the well with the theatrical flare it deserved and the 6.5-pound plus beauty sent the cold, wet crowd into a state of heightened expectation that something big was about to happen. Would that elusive 30-pound barrier actually be broken right here and now? Could these late season smallmouth specialists set a new all-time Canadian bass tournament record with all the hype and hoopla that would go with it?
The bass were put into the Shimano in-water weigh-in system. The crowd hushed as Mercer yelled out, “Ladies and gentlemen, they may not have set a new Canadian record but Bob Formosa and Jayson Saliba have just weighed in 29.22 pounds and are the new 2007 Bass Pro Shops Lake Simcoe Open Champions!”
Yes, it sure was quite an event that the Aurora Bassmasters hosted last Saturday.
Sibbald’s proved to be an excellent location and of course the fabulous late fall smallmouth fishery of Lake Simcoe lived up to its world class reputation. The crowd enjoyed free Johnsonville Brats, served up by one of the organizers – George Wallace, marketing manager of BPS.
Naturally Dave Mercer kept the crowd entertained as he always does on stage, while behind the scenes volunteers from the Aurora Bassmasters assisted biologists Jason Borwick and Jeff McNiece with an historic bass tagging research project. Alongside these two ace bios was Matt DeVille of Queens University along with his students who headed up the physiology component of the project. They will examine the effects of decompression on bass caught from deep water and try to determine if fizzing is a viable treatment for these bass.
Onlookers were intrigued by the fizzing process, handled by Simon and Melanie Frost and myself as we carefully inserted needles into the air bladders of these distended bass. As the fish were held underwater, the air slowly dissipated from the swim bladder from the needle and allowed the bass to swim freely to the bottom. Preliminary results from last year’s tagging project already show bass have been re-caught from Simcoe 10 months after being fizzed. The long overdue research will continue under the direction of Dr Bruce Tufts of Queens.
For many of the competitors such as myself, fishing was very tough – not just because of the strong winds that kept us off our prime spots, but more so, that those prime late fall spots had just not begun to set up yet. With water still in the 58F range – it was almost 10 degrees warmer than it should be for late October so our big bass were just not to be found. Thirteen teams however did find over 20 pounds of bass for their top five, so there were plenty of big bass weighed in.
The heaviest single bass was caught by the team of Mark Kulik and Dave Kennedy who had a 7.02-pound giant that, thanks to the addition of Yamabucks earned the team an extra $2,400. If that bass broke the Ontario record, (9.84 pounds) it would have earned the team a new Toyota Tundra Truck and Tracker Tundra boat.
Instead of targeting the seemingly more prolific big bass of Lake Simcoe, tournament partner Gerry Heels and I focused our fishing efforts on the more elusive smaller bass just over the minimum 12 inch size limit. We did this, I told the weigh-in crowd, because the research crews needed a few small fish to tag as well as all those big bass that would dominate the data sheets. By selflessly sacrificing our desires to win this event with a 30-pound bag, we brought in a grand total of 7.1 pounds for our heaviest five bass. Yes, it was quite the accomplishment to be able to find and catch a five fish limit of miniature smallies that would not surpass the single Big Fish catch. Yet, we managed to do just that as Kulik and Kennedy’s biggest bass did indeed weigh more than all of our five.
For their win, Formosa and Saliba took home the guaranteed minimum first place winnings of $7,500. They also won an over $1,000 in Aurora Bassmasters greedy bucks.
Stay tuned to next week’s column to learn how they caught their fish, what lures they used and a whole lot more.