Thirty-nine teams departed the docks early Saturday morning – some perhaps a little groggy from the previous evening's cornhole tournament, which habitually morphed into sizable bar tabs and a disregard of the looming 4 a.m. alarm. The storms long forecasted to disrupt the competition never showed. Instead, a blue sky lured all sorts of boaters to the water, their motors churning up the Channel, giving the fishermen a rough ride.

In the end, 26 teams returned to Alhonna for the weigh-in. One by one, the anglers marched their weigh bags up the dock and into an assembly line, where officials transferred their catch onto a scale, the bass flopping inside a plastic laundry basket as a digital monitor revealed their worth. In the end, boat 12's Rich Tournear and Rick England hooked the tournament's heaviest haul – their total catch weighing 14.65 pounds. But none of those five fish outweighed the day's biggest bass, a 4.6-pounder caught by Bill Roney and Josh Dement of boat 11.