Story by Ken Duke | Photos by Tanner & Travis Lyons
The NPFL 2025 season finale is this week, September 25-27, 2025, on Logan Martin Lake in Alabama. It’s the second NPFL event to be held on the lake. The other was the 2024 season opener.
Technically, a season opener—or any other regular season tournament—is worth just as much as any other, but a season finale is a lot more dramatic, and maybe even a lot more interesting … depending on the stories to be told.
The stories left to tell about the 2025 NPFL season are fascinating, and the finale promises to be one of the most compelling events in the League’s history. We’ll get to that soon, but for now let’s cover the fishery itself. To set the stage, let’s talk about the stage: Logan Martin Lake.
Logan Martin Lake covers 15,263 surface acres at full pool and offers 275 miles of shoreline. That’s not very big when you consider there will be more than 100 competitors on the water this week. In fact, it’s the smallest body of water ever to host an NPFL tournament.
The lake averages 18 feet deep but its maximum depth is 110 feet. We might find that a few anglers are fishing below the average depth this week, but it’s a near certainty that most will be targeting cover, structure and bass less than 18 feet deep.
Logan Martin was impounded on August 10, 1964, so it’s 61 years old—not ancient as Southern reservoirs go, but it’s no spring chicken, either. It was built for hydroelectric power, flood control, and recreation.
The lake was named for William Logan Martin Jr. (1883-1959). He was Alabama’s attorney general from 1915 to 1917 and served as the general counsel of Alabama Power Company. His older brother, Thomas, was one of the founders of Alabama Power and served as its president and later as chairman of the board from 1920 to 1964. Thomas was the driving force behind the lake and dam. Work on the dam began in the early 1960s—shortly after Logan’s death. That’s when Alabama Power decided to name the dam and lake after him.
[Note: The “other” and larger Lake Martin—south of Logan Martin Lake—is named for Thomas Martin and was built in the 1920s. If you want to have a lake named after you, your best bet is to first become the president of the power company that finances it!]
Logan Martin Lake is owned and operated by Alabama Power Company.
The lake offers three species of black bass: Largemouth (Micropterus nigricans), spotted (M. henshalli) and redeye (M. coosae) bass. There’s a five bass daily creel limit and a 12-inch size limit. Both apply to this week’s tournament. For forage, the bass mostly look to crayfish, panfish, threadfin shad, various minnows, and the occasional terrestrial tidbit.
Logan Martin is not known for giant bass or massive stringers. When the NPFL was here last February, Will Harkins won with a three-day total of 47 pounds, 9 ounces, and the biggest bass of the event weighed less than seven pounds. The heaviest daily catch was an ounce over 20 pounds. Most of the pros and local experts believe it will take between 45 and 51 pounds to win—15 to 17 pounds per day.
There are 11 Alabamans in the field and most of them live within about an hour of Lincoln’s Landing ramp, which will be the launch and weigh-in site for the tournament. That adds to the drama and experience level that we’ll see this week, but it’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
In addition to the local factor, there’s the Progressive Angler of the Year race between Kyle Welcher, Patrick Walters, and Greg Hackney, plus the battle for berths in the 2026 NPFL Championship. All of that plays out this week on Logan Martin Lake, and we’ll tell you all about that … tomorrow.
[Note: The 2025 regular season is the qualifying period for the 2026 NPFL Championship. This year’s Championship—to be held next week on South Carolina’s Lake Hartwell—will be fished under 2024 NPFL rules by 2024 qualifiers. That event will allow real-time imaging units (“forward-facing sonar”) for the last time in NPFL competition. The 2026 Championship will prohibit that technology in accordance with 2025 rules.]
