The Big Pond Awaits: Champions Tour Heads to Lake Mille Lacs for Regular Season Finale
The regular season is coming down to its final stop.
After two wildly different events at Big Stone Lake and Lake Pokegama, the Classic Bass Champions Tour, Presented by Skeeter Boats and Yamaha, is heading to one of Minnesota's most famous bass fisheries for the third and final stop of the regular season. On Sunday, August 2nd, the Champions Tour field will finally take on Lake Mille Lacs in an event presented by Vocelka Fishing and Customs and Northland Fishing Tackle.
Known across Minnesota as "The Big Pond," Lake Mille Lacs is one of the largest lakes in the state, stretching across more than 132,000 acres with roughly 105 miles of shoreline. Despite its enormous footprint, the lake is remarkably shallow for its size, with a maximum depth of just 42 feet. Its expansive rock, gravel, sand and mud flats create a fishery where anglers can spend an entire day covering water and still feel like they've barely scratched the surface.
And right now, the bass fishing on Mille Lacs is at it’s peak. Quite simply, there may not be a better smallmouth bass fishery in the United States.
The event was originally scheduled for May, when the lake was primed to potentially produce some truly historic results. The bass population is as strong as it's been in years, and the size of those fish has anglers across the state talking. The combination of an incredible population and an abundance of big fish had the potential to make the springtime event one for the record books.
Then came the wind.
Mother Nature had other plans, and the original event simply couldn't happen. Now, nearly three months later, the Champions Tour is finally getting its shot at The Big Pond, but everything about this event will be different. Instead of a May prespawn event, anglers will now be competing in the heart of summer. The fish have had months to transition, spread out and settle into their summer patterns.
Adding another layer of difficulty is the abbreviated practice period. With only all day Friday and Saturday until 5:00 PM to prepare, anglers will have a limited window to break down one of the largest and most complex fisheries in Minnesota.
That's not a lot of time to figure out Mille Lacs.
To help set the stage for the final regular-season event, we turned to one of the anglers who knows The Big Pond better than almost anyone.
Josh Douglas has spent years guiding on Lake Mille Lacs, developing an intimate understanding of its world-class smallmouth population and the countless rock reefs, flats and structural elements that make the lake so unique. Douglas has also competed at the highest levels of professional bass fishing, with experience on both the Bassmaster Elite Series and FLW Tour.
Douglas has been fishing Mille Lacs long enough to have witnessed the lake move through multiple cycles, and in his eyes, the fishery is currently sitting at the peak of one of those cycles.
"Mille Lacs is a big fish factory, whatever grows there has the potential to get as big as Minnesota can produce," Douglas said.
While crawfish have played a major role in the lake's bass fishery in the past, Douglas believes the current population is being driven more by perch and cisco. Those forage sources are helping fuel a bass population that is producing some serious size.
"The fish are getting really big, and they've always been big," Douglas said.
But the timing of this event means the Champions Tour field won't be dealing with the Mille Lacs fishery that anglers would have seen back in May.
This is full-blown summer.
In fact, Douglas says the lake is already deep into the dog days of summer. Abnormally warm weather has pushed the fish around, while big algae blooms and the end of the major bug hatches have helped create a very different environment than the one anglers expected to fish earlier this season.
"If this tournament would have happened in the spring it would have been big schools, they would have caught A LOT," Douglas said. "Now there's some schools to be had, but it seems like they don't want to bite after you catch 1 or 2 out of a school."
That could create an interesting dynamic for the Champions Tour field.
Douglas has often thought about how he would approach Mille Lacs under the current Champions Tour format, particularly during a summer event. He's competed in the Champions Tour PRO/AM format when it featured an eight-fish limit, giving him plenty of experience thinking through the different ways to attack the lake when the goal is to build the heaviest possible bag.
But this time around, Douglas believes the strategy could be much different.
"This is the time, under this format, where I think the winner will be attacking big fish the whole time, not numbers," Douglas said.
The reasoning is simple: Douglas doesn't believe the summer bite will be consistent enough to stay on top of numbers all day. Instead, he expects anglers to focus their efforts on finding the biggest fish they can and maximizing every bite.
On Mille Lacs, that's a pretty good strategy.
"I think it's going to either be won on polar opposite ends of the spectrum," Douglas said. "It'll be won like deep deep, or it'll be reminiscent of other tournaments that have been out here where they're really shallow. It'll be based on the algae bloom."
That algae bloom could be one of the biggest factors in determining where the tournament is won.
The other may be the wind.
On a lake as large and shallow as Mille Lacs, wind can completely change the equation. Douglas expects anglers to have to pay close attention to how the weather is affecting the fish and the water throughout the day.
"If we don't have wind they'll be floating a lot more," Douglas said.
Those fish could then become prime targets for anglers utilizing forward-facing sonar to locate and target individual bass.
But if the wind picks up, the equation could change quickly.
More wind means more current moving through the lake, potentially pushing fish down toward the bottom and creating a better scenario for anglers throwing Ned rigs, larger minnow-style presentations and other bottom-oriented techniques.
In other words, the weather could dictate the entire tournament.
And on Mille Lacs, there's plenty of room for the fish to make anglers work for it.
While Douglas expects the hypothetical winning five-fish limit to potentially reach 28 to 30 pounds, he believes the overall weight required to win the every fish counts event could land around the 100-pound mark. That would likely require an angler to catch somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 bass throughout the tournament.
That's a lot of big bass.
But that's exactly what Lake Mille Lacs is known for producing.
After waiting nearly three months for their opportunity, the Champions Tour field will finally get its chance to see just how good The Big Pond can be. The lake is in the middle of a remarkable cycle, the bass are big, and the fishery is healthy. But with a shortened practice window and a completely different seasonal pattern than originally anticipated, anglers will have to put the pieces together quickly.
The final stop of the regular season is here, and at the end of the day we will have our field of 25 Anglers who will be competing on Lac Courte Oreilles in Hayward, Wisconsin on Tuesday, August 18th to win a BRAND NEW Skeeter ZX200.
Pundit Picks
Charlie Wright: Wright has been absolutely on fire the past 2 seasons and at this point he should be a pick to make the Top-10 at just about every event he fishes. He routinely shows his prowess with Forward Facing Sonar and quickly has risen to the favorites list whenever the Tour gets to smallmouth bass venues. Wright has performed well at Lake Mille Lacs in the past at a PRO/AM event, and after barely sliding to 2nd Place in the Angler of the Year race in 2025, he’s sitting in 3rd Place heading into Lake Mille Lacs. Even when the bite seems “tough” for others, Wright excels at keeping it simple and maximizing his bites, I see that playing into his favor at a dog days of summer Lake Mille Lacs event. Expect a good finish from Wright at this event.
Matt Holweg: Holweg is hot right now after a 2nd Place finish at the Champions Tour PRO/AM on Gull Lake, and a Top-5 Finish at our last stop on Lake Pokegama. Holweg has shown this numerous times on the Champions Tour in his career, when he gets hot, he gets REALLY hot. It seems like he may be on the verge of his first win on the Champions Tour right now. Holweg is a very versatile angler, but has shown that he excels when he’s able to target fish offshore, or better yet, just off the bank in general. He’s very proficient with his Forward Facing Sonar and one of the better smallmouth anglers on Tour. I’d expect him to simply cover more water, thoroughly, than most of his competitors on Lake Mille Lacs.
Brad Leuthner: Leuthner is due for a Champions Tour win. Simple as that. Add in that he won the MNBN Team Trail event that was on Lake Mille Lacs a few weeks ago, he’s obviously been spending time on Lake Mille Lacs and is very in tune with the fish and their migration right now. Add in Leuthner’s proficiency with Forward Facing Sonar and his ability to cover water, I think that makes him very dangerous on a Lake Mille Lacs that could be very stingy, but capable of producing very large bites. Leuthner has the experience to keep his head down and get the job done on Mille Lacs.
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