April 2, 2024

Garmin pros have now won four of the last five Bassmaster Classic championships.

March is a busy month of celebrations for Justin Hamner and his wife Christina. An eight-day span on their calendar includes both of the couple’s birthdays plus their wedding anniversary. Now they can add March 24 to the mix. That’s the day Justin reeled in a victory at the 2024 Bassmaster Classic Championship at Grand Lake O’ the Cherokees in Oklahoma.

Using LiveScope™ Plus live-scanning sonar and several other Garmin marine electronics, Hamner secured a wire-to-wire, career-defying win, notching four Garmin pro Bassmaster Classic victories in the last five years.

“Oh, my, it felt great,” Hamner said. “What I’ve put my family through to get to this point. … I’d be pouring concrete in the morning and running my lawn care business later in the day. I was never home, so while holding that trophy the first thing I thought of was my family.”

In just his second Bassmaster Classic appearance, he was hoisting the coveted trophy just three days after his 33rd birthday.

“It was a pretty dang good birthday present,” Hamner said. “It’s going to be hard to top that in the future. Maybe when we get home, we can all have a big celebration.”

Hamner credited the variety of Garmin marine products with playing a valuable role in his victory, including the revolutionary LiveScope Plus, sunlight-readable ECHOMAP™ Ultra 2 touchscreen chartplotters, detail-rich Garmin Navionics Vision+™ mapping and the powerful (and quiet) Force® trolling motor.

With LiveScope Plus, Hamner quickly targeted fish in brush piles at Grand Lake, which is one of the many U.S. lakes Garmin has surveyed for detail-rich mapping content.

“I was able to use the LiveScope to understand what the fish were doing and how they were reacting,” he said. “No doubt using it gave me an advantage to learn so much quicker because I’ve never fished at Grand Lake before. It makes me feel like I can break it down that much quicker.”

See LiveScope Plus in action here.

“I loved having the ActiveCaptain® app with the (Garmin Navionics Vision+) relief shading so I could scope out fishing spots the night before we dealt with the wind we had on day two,” he added. “It was great because it uploaded all those waypoints from the ActiveCaptain app directly onto my ECHOMAP Ultra 2 unit, so I didn’t have to sit there and remember where I needed to go while I was on the water. Having all the mapping capabilities and learning the lake before I got there was helpful.”

Speaking of the wind, thanks to his powerful Force trolling motor, Hamner was able to hold a precise anchor lock position despite strong winds, allowing him to set up away from fish on flats and make accurate casts.

“I used the anchor lock all the time (during the tournament),” Hamner said. “It’s the most precise anchor lock I’ve ever had because when I fish on these flats, if you get too close to these fish, they get so spooked.”

Hamner wasn’t the only Garmin-sponsored angler to see success in this year’s classic. Cody Huff took third place, while Jay Przekurak placed fourth and Cory Johnson sixth. But that’s not all. Six of the top 10 finishers were Garmin pro anglers.

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