Ewing Minor Secures Susquehanna Win and AOY Lead

Most of the field looked at the eelgrass and turned around. Ewing Minor looked at it and reached for his lift line.

Minor won the 2026 Newport Bassmaster Kayak Series at Susquehanna River presented by Native Watercraft with a two-day total of 190.50 inches, taking $9,500 out of a 184-angler field competing for $36,800. It's his second win of the 2026 season, his second Susquehanna title, and it moves him to the front of the Pro-Guide Batteries Angler of the Year race with one regular-season stop left.

He led Saturday with 96.75 inches, anchored by a 20.5-inch smallmouth - a feat in of itself. He closed Sunday with 93.75. Ten smallmouth, two days, a repeat victory on the Susky.

The hard part came in the middle of Day 2.

The Reset

Minor caught a 19-incher inside the first ten minutes, off the same rock that gave up his 20.5 the day before. Then it went quiet. In his own words afterward, "...things felt like they were falling apart": a bad rotation, boats stacked around him, and the creeping sense that he was working water somebody else had already picked over. He was getting hung in trees. He was watching other kayaks instead of his own line.

His answer wasn't to reset and swing bigger. To run to a stretch he knew held nothing but 16- and 17-inch fish and catch a few on purpose. Get hooks in fish. Stop keeping tabs on everyone else.

Anyone who's fished the back half of a two-day event knows how hard that call is with money on the line. It's also the call that won the tournament, because once his head was right, he went after the water that actually mattered.

The grass islands nobody wanted

The Susquehanna is dotted with grass islands, and the fish living around them are the ones worth catching. The problem is what sits between you and them: a few hundred yards of thick, shallow eelgrass.

That's a real barrier, and it's exactly why those islands hold fish. It burns the one thing a tournament angler can't manufacture more of. Most of the field ran the math and decided it wasn't worth the clock.

Minor's fix was simple. He trimmed up his motor to where the prop was coming out of the water, then skated the shallows on top of the grass to get through it. At the islands there was no eelgrass at all, just clean rock and a winning bag.

What the rig actually bought him

Minor runs a NK300, and what it gave him at Susquehanna was more than just speed or range. 

Trim is the whole story. Being able to set the shaft where the water demands it is the difference maker. Minor treated it as a setting, not a problem. That's a small thing on paper and a large thing at 9 a.m. on Sunday with a bad rotation in the field of anglers.

The quiet mattered too. His fish were sitting in six to eighteen inches of water, tight to grass and wood, and they were crushing a wake bait the instant it landed. Fish that shallow and that keyed up don't give you a second chance if you announce yourself on the way in.

And when the morning fell apart, he could go somewhere else and start over without losing the day to it. 

There's a symmetry worth noting. When Minor won this river in 2024, the motor bought him distance. He ran up river and away from the pack. In 2026 it bought him the opposite: skinny water three hundred yards off the beaten path. Same rig, opposite problem, and both times the answer was reaching water other people couldn't be bothered to reach.

What He Threw

Topwater, both days. The 20.5-inch Day 1 fish and a 19-incher on Day 2 came on a quarter-ounce Boogerman buzzbait with a Strike King Rage Menace trailer in Glacier. Most of the Day 2 limit came on a discontinued wake bait in golden shiner, worked across the shallow grass: two 17s, a pair of 19-and-a-halves, and an 18¼.

A Record That Keeps Building

Minor, 24, lives in Dandridge, Tennessee. He grew up on the James and other small Virginia rivers before adding the dam-controlled tributaries of the Tennessee River to his home water, which is part of why the Susquehanna clicked for him the first time he launched on it in 2021.

He won this event in 2024, took Dale Hollow in 2025, opened 2026 with a win at a weather-shortened Santee Cooper, and has cashed in every Kayak Series event he's entered this season: sixth at the Kissimmee Chain in February, 13th at Caddo and Bistineau in April. This isn't a breakout story. It's a pattern. The guy is unstoppable.

Carson-Newman Showed Up Too

Minor is head coach of the kayak fishing team at Carson-Newman, his alma mater, and his anglers had a week of their own. Jordan Lovejoy won the college division and finished sixth overall against the full field. Joseph Boily took third in the college event. Both were breaking down a river that looks nothing like the water they normally fish.

It's also why Minor is skipping the final regular-season stop on Wisconsin's Wolf and Fox rivers on August 22–23. He's already qualified for the championship, and the team comes first.

The Top 5

Rudy Yarworth took Big Bass honors and a $500 bonus with a 20.75-inch smallmouth on Day 2.

The Susquehanna event was hosted by the Columbia Montour Visitors Bureau, with tournament headquarters in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Newport is the title sponsor of the Bassmaster Kayak Series.