Story by Ken Duke
Catching a limit is critical in bass tournament competition. In fact, no one has ever won a National Professional Fishing League tournament without weighing in a limit of bass on each day of competition.
It will come as no surprise then that catching more fish is a strong indicator of success, even though you can only bring five of them to the scales each day. The correlation between the number of bass an angler catches and the weights he posts is unmistakable. So much so that if any angler manages to bring a 5-bass limit to the stage each day for a full season, he’s all but guaranteed to earn a berth in the championship and will likely be in the hunt for Progressive Angler of the Year honors.
So, with half the 2024 NPFL season in the books, and half still ahead of us, who’s been the best at bringing in a limit each day? The answer to that question is practically the same as the answer to who’s leading the AOY race.
Through three tournaments and nine days of competition, only 14 pros have limited every day. Here they are along with their current AOY ranking:
Angler AOY
Kyle Welcher 1
Jason Burroughs 3
Hunter Sales 4
Isaac Peavyhouse 5
Bailey Gay 6
Jesse Millsaps 9
Joseph Webster 10
Louis Fernandes 11
Trent Palmer 12
Brock Bila 16
Wes Logan 23
Barron Adams 27
Jason Meninger 37
Craig Saylor 55
That’s five of the top six and nine of the top 12, so it’s an impressive group. Drew Cook — currently second in AOY — only brought four to the scales on opening day of the season at Logan Martin Lake in Alabama. Ditto for Patrick Walters, who’s seventh in AOY. The 2023 NPFL Angler of the Year, Todd Goade, fell one short of a limit on Day 1 at Pickwick Lake, and it puts him in eighth in the AOY chase.
If Cook, Walters, or Goade had been able to add one more bass to their catches on the days they stumbled, it would seriously shake up the AOY leaderboard, and I can assure you that any fish they lost those days haunt them. That’s just how tight the competition is on a major tournament trail.
Of course, catching a limit on every day of competition is not an easy task, even in these days of forward-facing sonar. It’s only been done a handful of times and was not accomplished in the NPFL in either 2022 or 2023.
How many of the 14 anglers who have limited each day this year will be able to keep their streaks going? It’s impossible to say, but with challenging events ahead on Saginaw Bay (Michigan), the St. Johns River (Florida), and Lake of the Ozarks (Missouri), it’s a good bet that some — and maybe most — will slip.
What’s a good catch rate for top level tour anglers? That’s a statistic I like to call “Bassing Average” or “BAvg.” Very few anglers on any tour have managed to limit every day, but if your BAvg is 4.7 or better (out of a possible 5.0), you’re having a great year.
That number has gone up significantly across the trails in the past few years, likely due to the impact of live forward-facing sonar. For example, the BAvg on the Bassmaster Elite Series is significantly higher than ever this season despite the fact that I believe the talent level — though strong — is not higher than it was before the schism that sent dozens of top pros to rival Major League Fishing.
On the NPFL tour, Todd Goade (who posted a historically great season in 2023 when he was top 10 in all six events and won AOY) posted a BAvg of 4.89 last year. In 2022, Sheldon Collings, Taylor Umland, and Taylor Watkins all posted a BAvg of 4.94. All of them tallied limits every day of competition but one for an entire season. Goade’s number was slightly lower only because two days of the 2023 season were cancelled due to unsafe weather.
BAvg is a stat you won’t find anywhere other than the NPFL, but it tells a story, and it speaks to the importance of filling every spot in the creel.
It even impacts average bass size because an angler who catches more bass has more opportunities to cull, and that means a higher average bass weight.
We’ll cover that next time when we take a closer look at who catches the biggest bass on the NPFL tournament trail.
