Former tour pro and longtime California Delta ace Ish Monroe caught 62.79 pounds over three days to in the BAM Trail Pro/Am West Division event on his home waters over the weekend.
Monroe, whose final-day bag tipped the scale at 23.48, pocketed $9,250. Contingency earnings more than doubled his haul.
“Everything went right pretty much the whole week,” said Monroe. “This is my time of year. I love it because they’re always eating a frog and the punch. I don’t pick up a dropshot. I don’t have a spinning rod in the boat.”
Two other local stalwarts, Hunter Schlander and Christian Ostrander, placed 2nd and 3rd with weights of 59.62 and 52.22, respectively.
Foregoing any type of finesse tactic, Monroe added a ChatterBait to his arsenal and relied on it heavily for the final day.
“It was a JackHammer in B-Hite's hot craw, a brown and red color with a Missile Baits Spunk Shad trailer in rotten tomato, a color exclusive to Fisherman’s Warehouse, so you got to go there to get it,” he said.
His punch rig held a Missile Baits D Bomb, and he rotated through three colors – rotten tomato, along with peanut butter and jelly and candy grass. His frog fish fell to a River2Sea Phat Mat Daddy.
Although he managed to land more than two dozen keepers each day, Monroe’s fishing time was abbreviated as he made a 160-mile trek daily to his fishing location.
“I got into an area that you really cannot get into on super-low water, but we had the perfect tides; we had low incoming water to get in and high outgoing water to get out,” he said. “I ran my Yamaha 160 miles burning about 40 gallons of gas every day.”
Monroe was excited to finally get the BAM Delta victory as it had just slipped away from him the year prior when he finished 2nd on the tidal-water fishery.
Runner-up Schlander's biggest bag (21.55) came on Day 3, when the conditions changed.
“The first two days there was no wind, and that made it really difficult,” said Schlander. “The fish were just not wanting to eat and cooperate; so, I punched and frogged the first two days and today completely changed it up. I threw a red ChatterBait most of the day.”
After catching just 13.55 on Day 1, Ostrander rallied for a Top-3 finish. He also caught his heaviest stringer (20.40) on Day 3.
“I caught fish out of Frank’s Tract, out of Big Break, out of Mildred; I caught ‘em all throughout the Delta,” Ostrander said. “I punched and threw a (Whopper) Plopper, and threw a ChatterBait, and flipped around through the tules with a half-ounce weight. Today, I threw a squarebill with the wind.”
