2020 World Championships
By Ryan Steinhoff
The road to the Jr. World Championships started with a side trip to Arkansas where I helped my cousins learn to catch some bass. They are 5 and 6 and really enjoy fishing. After a few days, we started the drive to Ohio. The drive was a long 20 hours. Unfortunately, the beginning of our tournament started a little rough and learned a few things the hard way…always read the rules. We got there one day too early and started to pre-fish. Learned pretty fast that we weren’t allowed to be on the water yet… With us being a day early, TBF gave us an 8 once penalty and we had to miss a half-day of practice. During practice, we only found one good spot and found a few others that had a few keepers. The first day of the tournament, we went straight to our spot and fished there the whole day and ended up catching four keepers. We caught those using a Texas rig. Those four keepers put us at the top of the Western division. The second day of the tournament was really rough. We only got two bites and capitalized with two keepers. We found out that those two keepers were enough to clinch the Western division and gave us the opportunity to fish on the final day and try to win the world championships. On the Championship day, we did not have a single keeper until 11:30. We were starting to get pretty nervous! We got our first keeper at the spot we fished for during the first two days of the tournament. We made a small adjustment and changed to the inside of the point. We ended up catching 11 to 13 keepers! These were caught on senkos. On the boat ride back, we were so nervous that we didn’t have enough weight, all we could do was wait and pray. It was finally our turn to weigh in and were really happy with the weight. We weighed in at 10lbs 6oz which was enough to win the Jr World Championships and to bring a win to Colorado. This was an experience that I will never forget. There are so many people that I would like to thank: Sam Heckman, Rod Allen, our boater and Captain Steve Way, my partner Cody Miller, Tyler Hassler, Trokar, Garrett Marquez, Kim Miller, Southern Colorado Junior Bass Club, Eagle Claw, Parents, Milicia Marine, Colorado Custom Lure, TBF for putting on an awesome tournament.
