Real Fun at the Reel Country Classic

By Erik Osberg

I’m not a real tournament angler or a full time fishing guide, however I like to play one on the weekends. Since 2018, I’ve teamed up with my buddy Randin Olson of Lock Jaw Guide Service to fish in the Reel Country Classic Walleye Tournament on Otter Tail Lake. This year’s field included 78 teams of two anglers and over $10,000 in prizes.

DAY 1

We didn’t have high expectations coming into the 2023 event. Neither Randin or I had fished Otter Tail Lake very much leading up the tournament. We had found a few walleyes pre-fishing but we didn’t have any kind of pattern dialed in. Takeoff is at 8am and we were in the second flight. Randin likes to be early, We met at 6am, launched his boat and headed over to Beach Bums for check in. It was chilly Friday morning. There was a strong wind out of the north. We knew we were in for some bumpy weather. We flew to our first spot fighting big waves along the way. Within 7 minutes Randin had a walleye in the boat. He caught another pretty quickly, then it was my turn. I caught a few back to back and we were feeling pretty good.

How it works

In this tournament you weigh in 6 fish, 2 of them can be 20 inches or over. The others have to be between 15 and 20 inches. Culling is allowed, meaning if you have 6 walleyes in the box, and you catch a bigger one, you can release the smaller fish. We had 6 decent walleyes in the box by 9am. Now we just needed to upgrade. Our approach was using a 1/16 oz jig tipped with a spot tail shiner. Randin was back-trolling into the wind in water ranging from 8-12 feet deep. The trick was using a rod that was light enough to cast the small lure, yet sturdy enough to get a good hook set. My rod of choice is a 7′ Panhandler from JT Outdoor Products.

Since we had our “unders” in the box, we started looking for bigger fish. For me, this means throwing a plastic instead of using a jig & minnow because I am hoping to trigger a reaction bite. We tried pretty much everything we could including; hair jigs, crank baits, stick baits, you name it. The best we could do was 2 fish around 21 inches and 4 fish between 19 & 20 inches. Our total weight for day 1 was 14.58 lb which put us in 28th place. While we weren’t in the money, we were happy with a good day of fishing in less than ideal conditions. In all we caught 25 walleyes.

Day 2

Saturday was a different story weather wise. The morning started dead calm and it was actually kinda hot. We got off to a slower start as our first fish didn’t come until 8:45am. The good news is it was a 24 inch walleye. We went with the same presentation to start. 1/16 oz. jig & minnow in 9-12 feet of water. It was so calm, we could actually see the walleyes in the water. It was just a matter of getting them to bite.

Once again, we had our six keepers pretty quick despite the slow beginning. By 9:15am we were looking for upgrades. I switched to a plastic earlier because we really only needed one big fish to put us in contention. The only difference in our game plan for day 2 was to dedicate our time to one section of the lake. We didn’t want to be wasting time going for boat rides all over the place. The section we fished was pretty big, so we weren’t limiting ourselves.

Top 10

In the end, we weighed in 17.24 pounds on day two. That was good enough for 10th place. One of the things that we like about the Reel Country Classic Walleye Tournament is that each day is scored separately. That means we cashed a check on day two and came home with some hardware.

If you are looking for a fun tournament that offers great prizes and good fishing, I highly recommend you check out the Reel Country Classic. Tournament organizers say they would like to get the field up to 100 boats next year. I know that we will be back. If you’d like to fish with Randin, check out his info here. If you’d like to fish with me (Erik), I do offer evening & weekend guide trips too.