Presented by Yamaha Motor Corp USA and Warrior Boats Inc.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 21, 2023
Contact: Denny Fox, 920-505-0122
Anglers Insight Marketing LLC (AIM™)
Doubling Down: Lake Sak Falls To Father-Son Team Grothe, Taking First Sunday To Repeat Father’s Day Win
All you can say about what happened in the AIM Weekend Walleye Series third North Dakota qualifier, the Warrior Boats/Pure Powersports Open on Lake Sakakawea Sunday (June 18) is, how about those Grothes?
Ross and his 13-year-old son Roger Grothe, from Baldwin, duplicated a Father’s Day win that Ross celebrated with son Reid in 2015, that time on Minnesota’s Lac Qui Parle, and this time in the Grothe household’s new resident state, North Dakota.
“What an amazing day to two-peat what the Grothe family did seven years ago,” said Denny Fox, AIM national tournament director. “Team Grothe slammed Lake Sak with 33.99 pounds of walleye, earning them $4,000 from AIM, plus $1,000 in Warrior incentive cash, and $750 from the Yamaha Power Pay incentive program. You might say it was quite a payday, but it was more of quite a Father’s Day for Ross and Roger. They won the North Dakota state championship on Lake Sak in 2022, then they finished third at this year’s National Championship Shootout on Lake Koshkonong in Wisconsin, and turned in a fourth place on Lake Audubon, and now, this. This one has to be extra sweet and is so much more than just winning a tournament.”
“What I attribute this to is my father,” said Ross Grothe. “He is no longer with us, and I had a wonderful relationship with my dad. We spent a lot of time together enjoying the outdoors. I’m not a real spiritual person, but I feel he’s been in the boat with us giving us the confidence to do the best we possibly can.
“I just don’t know any more other than being fortunate and being fortunate that the stars aligned again. This is super competition, and when you’re looking at Lake Sakakawea, it’s just massive. Everybody’s got the same technology and it’s just a matter of how to decipher what you’re seeing,” he said.
That ability to spot the fish needed to win, he said, was the key after he found the right pods moored on a point of the lake on Friday, but still in the Van Hook Arm, about 20 miles from the launch at Parshall. They were using a new prototype Berkley glide bait that will be on the market in September to trigger them, and then using a combination of leeches, minnows and crawlers to take the right ones to win.
“I do a lot of aggressive fishing to try to trigger fish. This wasn’t some great distance that we had to travel. It was a combination of sand and rock and I believe it was a staging area for fish that were migrating,” he said.
“When we found them on the day of the tournament; they had moved maybe 400 yards” from where they found them pre-fishing. It also didn’t hurt that he fished another tournament the weekend before, and figured out what was going on.
They used new Berkley Power Switch bait, a scented soft tail on a jig. He said it has a different profile made for forward-facing sonar like the Garmin LiveScope on their 208 Warrior, powered by a 300 Yamaha. They used that bait to make’em twitch, then zeroed in with live bait.
“When we located the fish, we slowed down and located the larger pods of big fish by fine-tuning our electronics. We then presented them with live bait, minnows, leeches and night crawlers, and kept switching things up. I set up Sunday where I had ended pre-fishing and started working our way down the shore, zigzagging from deep to shallow until we were able to locate some of the larger ones.
He said the new bait triggered the fish. “We used that to our advantage to find those more aggressive schools, and that with electronics is changing things drastically” in walleye world. That advantage brought them that win, he said. To the tune of a 26-1/2 as their second fish. On their card at the awards, that one, a 27-1/2, a 23-3/4, a 25-3/4 and a 24-1/4. Not bad.
“We caught maybe a 15 or 16-incher, and our second. Things were getting better as time went by. By 9:30 a.m., we felt we had 29 pounds in the boat. I told Roger we might have a shot at it if we got one more two- or three-pound upgrade. And about 2 p.m., Roger set the hook and I could tell it was a good fish. He did a great job and we landed it and it was that 24-1/4, and I said we might have a chance.
“Anything over 30 pounds is impressive, but we felt we were in a position to be very competitive, and we never quit. We kind of sealed the deal by taking that 24-1/4-incher,” he said. Those often-tough Lake Sakakawea winds never showed, and Grothe said a little more wind may have even helped.
“It’s been surprisingly calm, which is nice, so I’ll take it. The fish still bite,” he said. How they feel they’re sitting for North Dakota Yamaha Motor Corp. Team Of The Year? Probably pretty good.
“I’ve gotta believe we’re going to be right up there, and obviously that will be in the back of our minds, shooting for it as a goal. We had a fourth in the first event, and a 16th, so we go to Devils Lake (that’s on July 9, when AIM competition returns after the Fourth of July break).
“The championship is back on Lake Sakakawea (from Beulah Sept. 8-9), so we feel comfortable going into that. We’ll see what happens.”
The second -place team of Brandon Van Dusen of Minot and Wyatt Wahl of Douglas did some similar moves, but they used creek chubs to take 31.45 pounds and $2,750 in their Mercury 400 Verado-powered boat, with also forward-facing sonar at the bow.
“Pre-fishing, with there being no boundaries, we looked at the whole playing field,” Van Dusen said. “We ran south probably 20 miles and worked our way back into Van Hook Arm, so we ended up finding fish farther south. But the day before we checked our fish south and couldn’t get them to bite, so we made the decision to stay close.”
And like the Grothes, the more the morning progressed, the better their fishing was. “We caught more fish in the morning, but it wasn’t necessarily all the bigger ones. We had 11 on the card and probably caught six or seven in the morning. The fish were very spread out and all at different depths. Wyatt was running the boat at the front, and we basically had that thing looking out 100 feet and hunted down the bigger fish,” Van Dusen said.
We were fanning looking deep and shallow, and where we saw schools, we’d point the trolling motor there. We caught one of our card fish in 12 feet and one in 27,” he said, also echoing what Ross Grothe said.
“We were probably trolling chubs at .4 to .6 mph, and we were doing a lot of “S” turns and when we made that turn the inside rod got hit a lot. But we tried to go slower and that didn’t seem to work. It had something to do with slowing and speeding up, triggering those fish.
“Our first fish was a 23-1/4. We caught that one at probably 7:30 a.m. And then it was just kind of slowly picking them out. Every third or fourth pod we’d get one to go. Our biggest was a 26,” Van Dusen said.
Their last to go was a 25-1/4. We were fishing fairly close to the ramp, so we ground it out until the last minute to get one more big one to go. We couldn’t make it happen,” he said. “We did get fooled by a big pike. We thought that was the big one.”
Van Dusen said that Lake Sak’s walleye are getting healthier and bigger, a sign that those using forward-facing sonar like LiveScope are happy with their own versions of AIM’s Catch-Record-ReleaseÔ system.
“As long as everybody can practice good catch and release, people continue to be smart and let the bigger ones go. The lake has just really gotten healthy, so that shows everybody has been practicing good catch and release on those bigger fish. You can snap a picture and send to friends and family. There’s nothing better than letting a big fish go, and that’s my favorite part about AIM. It’s a sweet deal for AIM and all North Dakota anglers.”
Counting down the rest of the top five, in third place, with 30.44 pounds and taking home $1,500 were Derrik Sonsalla and Brent Wollschlager of Parshall. In fourth were Craig and Shaeli Kolden of Garrison, who carded 30.32 pounds, and won $1,100. Earning a fifth and $900 were Grant Miller and Cole Frenzel of Dickinson.
Fan Nation, have fun over the Fourth of July, but get ready. Because we’ll be back on July 9 to continue the fireworks with a double-header: we’ll be on the Mississippi in Hager City for a Minnesota Division tournament AND we’ll return to North Dakota, this time at the eastern end in an AIM favorite, Devils Lake, plus more to follow, leading up to those all-important state championships. Stay with us.
We at AIM are so appreciative of you following our teams. We publish how teams win so you can potentially use the same techniques and even lures they do on your own walleye hunts. We’re not only here to entertain, but to help you have a better fishing experience, including letting those bigs continue to spawn and conserve the resource.
Have a great Fourth and join us on the other side. Meantime, Stay tuned to AIM’s Facebook site updates Learn how you can register for the next events at aimfishing.com.
You know you want to. You know you can.
Anglers Insight Marketing LLC (AIM™) is a unique tournament organization created and owned by many of the most accomplished and recognizable professional walleye anglers, along with others who share the mission of advancing competitive walleye fishing and making it sustainable into the future.
AIM is committed to marketing excellence on behalf of its tournament competitors, the tournament host communities, and the brands that partner with it. AIM is also committed to maintaining healthy fisheries across the nation by the development of the exclusive AIM Catch-Record-Release™ format which is integral to its dynamic events and unparalleled consumer engagement. For more information about AIM™, AIM Pro Walleye Series™, AIM Weekend Walleye Series, AIM sponsors and AIM anglers, visit www.aimfishing.com.
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