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At the conclusion of the first day of competition in the 2015 Bass Cat National Team Championship, presented by Mercury Marine, the Texas team of Lee Morris and Josh Priest sit atop the leaderboard, with dual limits from Lake Taneycomo and Bull Shoals that totaled 14.42 pounds. That puts them ahead of their nearest competitors, the father-son team of Roger and Cory Cook, by a margin of 3.35 pounds.

Morris and Priest were the only team to catch a limit at both lakes. They trailed the Florida team of Edwin Rivera and Pete Saraf by 0.18 pounds after the morning session at Taneycomo, but the Floridians could only muster a single bass in the afternoon and fell to 4^th overall.

The Alabama team of Hunter Hayes and Alex Alford were the only competitors to weigh any of the two possible “bonus trout” at Taneycomo. At the end of the day, their lone 0.75 salmonid allowed them to move from 9^th place to 8^th, but with a difference of less than 12 pounds between 1^st and last, and two sessions remaining on Tuesday, it’s still anybody’s tournament to win.

“We went to Taneycomo blind,” said Priest, noting that the teams were not allowed to spend any of Sunday’s practice day there. “We found our fish in shallow grass around boat docks, in water less than 4 feet deep. All of our fish were caught on shakey heads and dropshots.”

Despite being from Texas, the pair reported that they frequently finesse fish, but are not used to the clear water of the Ozarks region. Nor did they have any lures in the 2008 Puma that they thought might attract a trout, so at Taneycomo they focused exclusively on bass, forgoing the bonus category.

Temperatures are supposed to be in the 40s at take-off tomorrow, climbing into the mid- to upper-60s, with clear skies. Morris said that those are their desired conditions, but they recognize that there are “some good sticks out there.” One of those teams is the Cook-Cook pairing on their heels. Father Roger Cook won the Championship with another partner last year and recruited his son – the new owner of a Cat of his own – to compete with him this in 2015.

While this is a Bass Cat event, when Ozarks region team Albert Scott and Stephen Clayton broke down yesterday, Rick Pierce extended the “family” umbrella a bit wider, allowing them to fish out of Scott’s Champion. The pair only mustered 2.69 pounds of Taneycomo bass today, but that’s 2.69 pounds more than they likely would’ve caught from the bank.

“It goes hand-in-hand with our sponsoring the Tournament of Champions for Champion boat owners and their guests on Table Rock the past few years,” Pierce said. “It has been held of Cape Fair Marina for a long time and in 2013 they ended factory support of the event and we picked up sponsoring the event.”

Competition will continue tomorrow morning at Bull Shoals, where Morris and Priest jumped into the lead today, and this marathon “test of the best” will conclude tomorrow afternoon at Norfork.

Monday marks the beginning of the third annual, two-day Bass Cat National Team Championship, presented by Mercury Marine, a no-entry, by invitation only tournament put on by Bass Cat’s Rick Pierce and other members of the “BCB Family.

” Nine teams have qualified via an equal number of regional events, and Pierce intends to put their analytical and physical fishing skills to the test, with a format that differs from those presented in 2013 and 2014. Whichever team executes the best will win an all-expenses paid trip to Lake Picachos, Mexico.

Both Monday and Tuesday will be daylight to dark affairs, split into two sessions each. Whichever team has the heaviest cumulative weight at the end of the four sessions will be declared the champions and they truly will have earned that title.

Monday afternoon’s session, as well as the Tuesday morning period, will be held on Bull Shoals, one of the most diverse fisheries in the United States and a true “pattern lake.” The tournament will conclude Tuesday afternoon with five hours on Norfork, another quality multi-species fishery with the potential for big weights. The bass on both reservoirs are committed to the fall feed right now and whoever unlocks a key pattern has the potential to claim a big lead.

The kicker in this format – and there’s always a twist in these events – is that Monday morning will be spent on Lake Taneycomo. While teams will be permitted to weigh in a five-bass limit during all four sessions, they’ll also be able to weigh in two “bonus trout” from Taneycomo, and that weight could prove to be the difference between the champions and the also-rans.

While the entirety of northwest Arkansas has played a critical role in the development of professional bass fishing and the bass boat industry, Pierce said that few of even the sport’s closest followers are aware of Taneycomo’s unique role in that history. “The dam is an original dam from the 1900s that started on the White River for power generation,” he explained. “This was a few decades before Table Rock, Bull Shoals and Beaver. Without Taneycomo, who knows if Branson would be Branson and if Bull Shoals or Table Rock would have ever been built.”

While the teams were given options as far as how they wanted to spend Sunday’s lone day of practice, one option was not open to them – Taneycomo remained strictly off limits. Since only one member of the field has been there before, Pierce believes that this will create a truly level playing field.

Temperatures in and around Mountain Home are expected to drop into the 30s tonight, but tomorrow should be clear with temps around 60. On Tuesday it’ll be even warmer, with the mercury approaching the 70 degree mark.

Look for updates after the conclusion of Day One, and for a full accounting of the tournament’s progression subsequent to the scales’ closure on Tuesday.