B.A.S.S. announced today that the 2016 BASSFest event will take place at Lake Texoma on the Oklahoma-Texas border, and the season-ending Angler of the Year Championship will be held at Minnesota’s Mille Lacs Lake.
“Similar to the GEICO Bassmaster Classic presented by GoPro, the Bassmaster Elite Series tournaments have become extremely popular ‘happenings’ for bass fishing fans," said B.A.S.S. CEO Bruce Akin. "By taking our fishing festivals to Lake Texoma and Mille Lacs, we will expose the sport to new fan bases, and our Elite Series anglers are sure to enjoy the new challenges these lakes present.”
In addition, officials of the world’s largest fishing organization revealed a new tournament for 2016: the Bassmaster Classic Bracket tournament, to be held on the Niagara River out of Buffalo, N.Y., July 19-22.
In that event, the Top 8 finishers in Elite No. 7 on Cayuga Lake in New York, will go head-to-head in a bracket format tournament that will pay $50,000 in cash – in addition to the prize money they will have earned at Cayuga – and award a guaranteed spot in the 2017 Classic.
The Classic Bracket will be streamed live on Bassmaster.com and will feature – for the first time ever in Bassmaster competition – catch-weigh-release scoring. Competitors will have their catches weighed instantly on the water by judges, and the bass will be released back into the water at the spots where they were caught. Only the heaviest five bass per angler will be counted.
Lake Texoma, an 89,000-acre impoundment of the Red River, was the site of the 1979 Classic won by Hank Parker. It was the site of Bassmaster Opens in 2007 and 2010.
Parker caught 31 pounds over 3 days and won $25,000 in the ’79 Classic by using a flipping stick borrowed from fellow competitor Gary Klein, shining the national spotlight on the then-new technique. Klein finished 4th in that event.
No B.A.S.S. professional tournament has ever been held on Mille Lacs, which lies about 90 miles north of Minneapolis. At 132,500 acres, the lake is Minnesota’s second-largest inland lake and is known among bass anglers as a bucket-list smallmouth destination.
Earlier this year, the state of Minnesota announced it would permit culling bass in major tournaments on Mille Lacs in hopes of inducing B.A.S.S. and other tournament organizations to schedule events there. The region’s tourism economy has been hard hit by a declining walleye fishery, on which lakeshore lodges and other businesses depend for much of their income.
“We applaud the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources for its efforts to accommodate competitive bass fishing,” said Akin. “The Angler of the Year Championship is expected to generate $3.4 million in economic impact for the region, and the area will continue to benefit as the bass fishing world learns about the fantastic fishing available in Mille Lacs Lake.”
