A coin flip turned off live sonar at Lake Champlain
B.A.S.S. settled its loudest rule fight with a coin toss. The first day of the Champlain tournament showed exactly what changed when the screens went dark.
On September 4, 2025, the people who run professional bass fishing settled their biggest argument the way you settle who pays for lunch. They flipped a coin.
The coin decided which 2026 Bassmaster Elite tournaments would allow forward-facing sonar, the live-sonar gear that has split the sport straight down the middle. Lake Champlain, a smallmouth stronghold running along the New York-Vermont line, landed in the no-sonar pile. On August 13, 2026, the boats left Plattsburgh with their screens dark.
The no-sonar event at a glance
- Event
- SPRO Bassmaster Elite at Lake Champlain, August 13-16, 2026
- The rule
- Forward-facing sonar not permitted
- Decided by
- A coin flip on September 4, 2025
- Day 1 leader
- Carl Jocumsen, 23 pounds 2 ounces, all largemouth
- Last sonar-era win here
- Brandon Palaniuk, 2020
What the screen actually changed
Forward-facing sonar, FFS for short, is a live video of the water around the boat. A transducer on the trolling motor throws a beam and paints whatever is out there in real time. An angler can watch a single smallmouth hang forty feet off the bow, lower a bait to it, and see the fish flare and refuse. On Champlain that mattered more than most places. Its smallmouth roam open water and suspend ten to thirty feet down, where older sonar showed only blips, if it showed anything at all.
Brandon Palaniuk won the Elite event here in 2020 and has watched the lake change since. "When I won in 2020, those fish were more structure-oriented, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore," he said. The fish now scatter and roam, a shift he and other pros partly blame on how precisely sonar lets them pluck fish off open water. Strip the screen away, he said, and "you're not gonna be able to pan around out there and see them and throw a minnow on their head."
How a sport talked itself into a ban
The National Professional Fishing League fired the first shot, banning the gear for its 2025 season. Its argument was less about fairness than about what kind of sport this should be. The league did not want bass fishing to become a contest of anglers staring at pixels. Bassmaster moved slower. For 2025 it capped anglers at one transducer and fifty-five inches of screen. For 2026 it drew a line through the schedule, allowing forward-facing sonar in five of nine Elite events and banning it in the rest, with a coin flip deciding which was which.
Cost is part of the complaint too. Elite angler Chris Zaldain made a viral video walking through what a full forward-facing setup now runs, and for some pros the electronics bill rivals the boat and the motor. That is a real barrier, and it feeds the feeling that the sport's top level is turning into an equipment auction as much as a fishing contest.
Clark Wendlandt, a four-time Angler of the Year, wrote a public letter urging Bassmaster to go further and ban it outright. His words were blunt: the technology "has no place in professional fishing events." Major League Fishing chose a third path, letting anglers run the sonar for one of three daily periods and making them declare which. Its communications director, Joe Opager, described the room about as well as anyone could.
People were either one hundred percent against forward facing sonar or a hundred percent for it.
What a dark screen looked like
Day one handed the no-sonar crowd some evidence. Carl Jocumsen took the lead with 23 pounds 2 ounces, and every fish in his bag was a largemouth, on a lake most anglers drive to for smallmouth. Drew Cook sat second with four smallmouth plus the day's big fish, a 5-13 largemouth he fooled on a wacky-rigged SPRO Wacky Snack. With the screen dark, anglers reached for the old toolbox. Crankbaits, jerkbaits, and topwater frogs got wet again. Reaction bites, the ones you cannot plan for, came back.
That is the part worth holding onto. Turning the sonar off did not make the lake harder for everyone. It changed what the lake rewarded. Palaniuk guessed the winning four-day total would drop to around 84 pounds, and that largemouth would carry more weight, because a largemouth in the weeds is predictable in a way a roaming smallmouth is not. "They'll be in places that are more predictable," he said. A coin flip, in other words, may have nudged a smallmouth shootout into a two-species tournament.
Why a coin flip was the honest choice
A coin flip is a strange way to govern a sport. It is also the only way to settle an argument nobody can win. The pro-sonar anglers are right that the fish still has to bite. The anti-sonar anglers are right that a screen can make open water feel like an inventory instead of a mystery. Veteran pro Mike Iaconelli captured the muddle with a shrug: "I don't like it. I'm not good at it, but it's not a reason to outlaw it."
So the sport left it to chance, which is about as humble as a governing body gets. The early returns suggest the coin landed somewhere interesting. The lake still gave up big bass. The anglers still caught them. They just had to cover water, read the bottom, and trust a jerkbait more than a cursor. Whatever you make of the technology, that is a nicer way to spend an August morning.
The rules at the top tend to slide downhill, too. Local club tournaments and regional trails have a habit of copying what Bassmaster and Major League Fishing do, so a single coin flip may quietly reshape weekend events all over the country. None of that resolves the argument. It just spreads it wider, which is exactly why a coin felt right. Some questions do not have a winning side, only a next chapter.
Sources
Every factual claim above traces to one of these. Links open in a new tab.
- Hard times on Champlain
- Anglers will need more than history to excel in Bassmaster Elite at Champlain
- Is forward-facing sonar a misnomer?
- Major League Fishing addresses sonar controversy
- Two major bass fishing circuits ban or restrict 'live sonar' technology
- Everything you need to know about MLF's 2026 forward-facing sonar rules
- Cracking the Code: Smallmouth Bass Fishing with Forward-Facing Sonar
- Lake and Basin Facts
