It takes a special kind of day to weigh nearly 27 pounds of bass and walk away as the runner-up. That is exactly what happened to YouTuber Milliken, who entered a small local derby — the kind that draws eight to 20 boats — fishing solo against two-man teams on a northern largemouth lake he had barely fished in years.
The bite was extraordinary. Working shallow around bedding fish, Milliken caught every single keeper on one bait: a 6th Sense Cloud, a wobbling stick worm fished weightless and wacky-rigged, in natural colours. Fish piled in — fives, a high-four, then the bag-makers, including a tank he weighed at 6 pounds 7 ounces. By mid-morning he had around 24 pounds and the day was, in his words, an absolutely epic start.
The only thing more numerous than the bass was the pike. "Doesn't matter if it's a rock pile, in the grass, a stick, a laydown, I'm catching pike out of it," he said of a lake that bit him off repeatedly through the session. He even boated a giant walleye on the stick bait late in the day.
Confident but not complacent, Milliken spent the last hour re-tying tackle for the next day's event rather than chasing more fish. Then came the weigh-in — and the locals. One team brought 27-and-change to the scales, their big fish edging his by a single ounce at 6 pounds 8. Roughly six anglers topped 23 pounds, an astonishing depth of quality for a northern fishery.
Far from sour, Milliken was full of respect. "Those guys brought it and I was crazy impressed," he said. "The fisheries, they're in good shape." He was just as struck by what won it: in an era of forward-facing sonar and high-tech baits, the whole field was beaten by, and he himself relied entirely on, the humblest lure in the box. As he put it, all the bass wanted was the stick worm.
There was a telling aside, too, from a man who has fished at the sport's top level. "I enjoy fishing the local eight-to-20-boat tournaments more than the Elite Series," he admitted — and on a day like this, with a lake full of giants and a parking lot full of locals who could match them, it was easy to see why.
The result was also a quiet vote for old-school finesse. A wacky-rigged stick worm — a straight, salt-impregnated soft plastic hooked through the middle so both ends quiver — is one of the first techniques many bass anglers learn, and it remains devastating on pressured, bedding fish. That it out-produced everything in a field bristling with forward-facing sonar and modern hard baits is the kind of detail tournament anglers love, a reminder that watching a screen still counts for little if the fish only want the simplest presentation in the box.