Grant Park and Coal City high school bass teams have each won sectional crowns this week in the first-ever Illinois High School Association’s bass fishing tournament.
Bradley-Bourbonnais also won a trip to the May 8 and 9 state finals with a second place victory at LaSalle Lake on Wednesday.
Coal City seniors Adam Banks and Brett Eggemeyer creeled a five bass limit weighing a total of 14.19 pounds. Handling the boat as a non-fishing partner was team coach Jim Martis. Banks also won big bass honors at LaSalle with a 3.46 pounder.
The Coaler team lead Bradley-Bourboonais by only 2.23 pounds on the final weigh-in.
BBCHS bassers Nate Bass and Chris Foster creeled five bass at 11.96 pounds. Keith Wolford served as coach and boat captain.
Third place went to Sterling Newman Catholic with five fish at 9.22 pounds.
Both Coal City and BBCHS had a second team that ranked among the top 10 teams in the sectional finals.
Team Number Two for the Coalers paired Ali Rodgers, a freshman co-ed, and senior Luke Whalen. They boated five fish for 5.93 pounds and a fifth place finish. Dan Rodgers served as the team’s captain.
Jack and Thomas Waldschmidt came in at eight place for the Boilermaker bassers with three fish at 3.26 pounds. The team was captained by Rick McCarty.
Ten of the 14 boats weighed fish at LaSalle with five teams creeling a five-fish limit.
Grant Park’s team led seven other schools in tough coditions at Heidecke Lake on Tuesday.
Derrick and Nick Abels of Grant Park creeled five bass for a total weight of 4.26 pounds in a rough and windy day. Derrick Abels landed all the keeper bass. He also landed the tourney’s only largemouth bass, tiny at 0.98-pound, but good enough to claim Big Bass honors.
Bill Ekhoff, a Grant Park teacher and veteran tournament fishermen , served as team coach and boat captain at Heidecke.
Andrew High School of Tinley Park came in second with three bass for a total of 2.52 pounds. Oswego High School came in third with three bass totaling 2.12 pounds.
Grant Park, Coal City and BBCHS will now advance to the May 8 and 9 state finals on Carlyle Lake northwest of Centralia. The teams will get one day to pre-fish the lake on May 7.
The spring wild turkey hunt continues to lag a bit behind last year’s harvest according to the latest report from Paul Shelton of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
“After two complete seasons, north zone hunters have taken 4,135 birds, compared to 4,622 in 2008 and 4,081 in 2007″ Shelton said Friday, April 24.
Hunters in Iroquois and Kankakee counties actually saw a modest increase during the second season.
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The Lyrid meteor shower — often disappointing but always unpredictable — will be peaking in the eastern sky just before dawn on Wednesday morning, April 22.
Only between 10 to 20 meteors are expected but the Lyrid shower can have surges of five to 10-times greater. That’s because researchers have never mapped the dust trail of Comet Thatcher which produces the Lyrid shower.
The Lyrids also comes as the crescent Moon passes in front of the planet Venus Wednesday morning. Unfortunately that conjunction will occur after sunrise for observers here in the Midwest.
Stargazers farther west will get to see a lunar occultation as the crescent Moon passed in front of the planet Venus.
The spring wild turkey season has gotten off to a slow start, off by 40 percent compared to last year according to Paul Shelton who manages the state’s wild turkey program.
A cold and rainy opening day on April 13 didn’t help much. Only 417 birds were taken compared to 696 last year’s opening day total.
Shelton’s early report arrived Friday morning, too late to be included in our regular Outdoors section report.
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Kids Fishing Day at Bird Park in Kankakee, has been postponed indefinately due to high water at the quarry.
This is the second time that the kids day has been canceled due to high water.
Flooding has damaged a dock and washed out shoreline access along the north wall of the quarry.
In late March the quarry was stocked with rainbow trout for the Kids Day which originally was set for April 4, the opening day of trout season.
The quarry remains closed to fishing indefinately according to the Kankakaee Valley Park District.
Legislation to broaden sales outlets and raise the price of the Federal Duck Stamp is being sponsored by Congressmen John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Robert Wittman (R-Va.).
If approved the legislation will allow federal duck stamps to be sold by any distributor approved by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
The bill will also increase the stamp from $15 to $25 for the 2010-2011 hunting season. The cost of the federal duck stamp has not increased since 1991.
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Illinois and metropolitan Chicago have been listed among the nation’s top sources of nitrogen and phosphorus pollutants into the Mississippi River Basin and are blamed for contributing to an 8,000-square-mile area in the Gulf of Mexico where oxygen levelsare too low to support aquatic life.
The Kankakee River Watershed stands out as the only watershed in Illinois and Indiana that is believed not to be among the top phosphorus contributors to the Mississippi /Atchafalaya River basins. However the report lists the total nitrogen load into the Gulf from the Kankakee basin as “uncertain.”
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Boating access has been shut down on a portion of the Middlefork River in Vermilion County.
The closure took effect at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday. It includes the river between the north end of the Middlefork Fish & Wildlife Area south to Kickapoo State Park near Danville.
River conditions were too dangerous for boating according to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
