Lake Cornelia Yellow Bass Crash

Lake Cornelia is another lake in Iowa that had fallen from popular places to fish.  The culprit...Yellow Bass.  As short as 5 years ago this lake produced panfish for the taking and provided anglers a nice place to fish year-round.  This is not the case anymore.  This lake is just one of the new problems Yellow Bass have created around the state.  For those of you that do not know, yellow bass can and will destroy smaller lakes that they end up in.  At no time should anyone, for any reason put yellow bass into any body of water.  Anglers can help curb the spread of yellow bass by enjoying a meal of them after you catch them.  They are good to eat, and they fight like crazy when you try to drag them up a 6-inch ice hole.  They have become one of my favorite fish to hunt down during the ice fishing season, and recently they brought me to the Lake Cornelia Yellow Bass Crash.

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This ice tournament was put together by Randy Bieghler of the Des Moines area.  The events has no doubt raised awareness about the dangers of yellow bass in smaller Iowa lakes.  February 16th marked the third of such events at this lake put on by the Central Iowa Icesticks group.  This event was like no other ice tournament I have ever participated in, as the goal was to catch as many yellow bass as possible.  Typically ice tournaments have a set amount of fish to bring in, however this was a race against time and all the yellow bass in Lake Cornelia we could find.  David Gissel and I set out to the deeper part of the lake, like 90% of everyone in the event.  We started drilling and immediately located schools of fish on the Vexilars.  They were not shy, and we started to catch yellow after yellow.  We quickly realized there were two distinct sizes of yellows in this lake, small and micro size.  The typical yellow bass baits worked, as these fish were hungry and have a lot of competition to get their daily allowance of food.  Jigs, spoons, it didn't really seem to matter, it also didn't seem to matter where we drilled holes.  In each new group of holes we drilled we found yellows of both sizes.  We continued moving and caching the whole day.  As mentioned, it was a race to see how many yellows you could catch.  I stuck to the same combo all day long, a Jason Mitchell Dead Meat Stick with a Quantum Drive reel.  This combo is ideal for moving and chasing yellows.  The line flows off the size 10 reel to quickly get your bait back down to the active yellows.  Another key to this setup is the large eyelets on the rod, they do not ice up as badly as other rods with smaller eyelets.  It is an awesome combo, especially for hunting yellow bass.  We were able to fill two 5-gallon buckets full of yellow bass, we had no idea on how many we had, and we certainly didn't count.  We weighed in 49.78# of fish, which got us 2nd place.  It was a great way to spend the day, although the size of fish were small it was fun to chase them.  Several kids also participated in the event, and thanks to the sponsors each child walked away with about $50 in merchandise.

The tournament as a whole weighed in just over 498 pounds of yellow bass.  The final count by the Central Iowa Icesticks was 5,621 yellow bass removed from the lake during this 5 hour tournament.  Quite a feat by the teams that participated, although it is a small dent in the population it brought awareness of the troubling yellow bass in small Iowa lakes and helped to get almost of 6,000 of them out of the lake.  Well done Randy on an effort to help improve the panfish populations at Lake Cornelia.

So, what happened to the near 500 pounds of fish, they were all given to the SOAR Raptor organization.  They will use the fish to feed the many birds they keep and rehabilitate.  You could say this event was a success all around.