By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
Great Bend and Barton County have had their fair share of state-bound athletes and state champions. But not everyone has the chance to compete at the national level. Great Bend graduate Blake Streck qualified for the 2023 Bassmaster High School National Championship in South Carolina. Needing a teammate, he invited classmate Noah Jerke for the 18-hour trip. Streck explained the high school sport.
"Normally it's a five-fish limit, and you get about eight hours," he said. "You just get your five biggest. If you get some small fish at the beginning of the day, and you catch bigger ones later in the day, you can take the small ones out for the bigger ones."
Kansas broke up its qualifying tournaments into eastern and western counties with four meets in the fall and four more in the spring. Fall competition was split at Wilson and Milford lakes, and Streck placed in the top-10 percent at Wilson to qualify for state. State was held at La Cygne Lake in early June, and with 28 boats in action, Streck again made the top three to qualify for nationals.
Bassmaster competitors use their own equipment, including a boat. An individual from Springfield, Mo. made the trip to Lake Hartwell, about an hour northeast of Atlanta, to lend the Great Bend pair his boat as captain.
"You can two fisherman and you have to have a boat captain because it's high school and you're not legal," Streck said. "They are kind of the regulator. They make sure you're doing everything right and being safe."
Competitors can only count largemouth or spotted bass, and they must be a minimum of 12 inches. Streck said the minimum has been tough in South Carolina. All teams kept three bass on day one of nationals, and the Panther team sat 293rd out of 481 boats in action after day one. Their fish totaled three pounds, nine ounces. Two teams from Virginia and Alabama have catches weighing in at more than 12 pounds. Fifty-two teams recorded no catches. All teams have two days of guaranteed fishing, but only the top-12 teams advanced to the finals on Saturday.
"Everything is backward compared to Kansas," said Streck. "The bait fish are different. The fish have different feeding patterns. Normally, when it gets hot outside in Kansas, the fish go deeper. Here in South Carolina, it's called a herring lake, so the fish go really shallow when it gets super hot."
Streck estimates Lake Hartwell is six times as large as Lake Wilson. The 56,000-acre lake hosted the Junior Nationals the week before, and that impacted the high school event.
"It's a big lake and there are a lot of fish," Streck said. "There have been tournaments this past week so they are highly pressured. They've got a lot of stress so they are super picky."
The Great Bend team is coached by Kevin Hoff.