Bemidji State students Luke Gillund and Robby Troje have qualified for Bassmaster’s national championship tournament, which will be held Aug. 10-12 on the home waters of Lake Bemidji.<\/p>\n
Gillund, a junior majoring in marketing communications, and Troje, a junior majoring in business administration, qualified for the championship after a second-place finish in the Bassmaster Wild Card Event, June 8-10 on Alabama’s Lay Lake. The duo was in 58th place overall after the first day’s weigh-in, then rocketed to 10th place after the second day on their way to a runner-up finish.<\/p>\n
Gillund said the team switched tactics and fished trees and stumps on an offshore ledge to improve their standing on the second and third days. They mainly used a crankbait, one of the most commonly used bass lures, and a shaky head jig to catch their fish. On Friday, the crankbait netted Gillund a double catch, his first ever, and on Saturday the shaky head landed the event’s largest catch — a 6 pound, 13 oz. largemouth that won the Bassmaster Big Bass Award for the tournament, more than a pound and a half heavier than the next-largest fish.<\/p>\n
“To qualify for the national championship and for it to be in our backyard is awesome,” Gillund and Troje said in a press release. “We can see the lakes from our school — that’ll be a neat experience.”<\/p>\n
Gillund and Troje will join fellow BSU fishing duo of Thor and Luke Swanson, who qualified earlier this spring at the Midwest Regional, at the national championships in August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bemidji State students Luke Gillund and Robby Troje have qualified for Bassmaster’s national championship tournament, which will be held Aug. 10-12 on the home waters of Lake Bemidji. Gillund, a junior majoring in marketing communications, and Troje, a junior majoring in business administration, qualified for the championship after a second-place finish in the Bassmaster Wild […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-link","hentry","category-uncategorized","post_format-post-format-link"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28417"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28418,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28417\/revisions\/28418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}