Club tourney report

Well it is long overdue for a report and I have much to report!!! I took some time off of work recently and did quite a bit of fishing on the might miss. I figured out several things in preparation for the first club tourney. The first was – I couldn’t catch any smallies of any size. The second was since the tourney was I pools 7 and 8 I wanted to rule out one pool or the other – since fishing seemed more consistent on pool 7 I focused my time there (that and the day I fished 8 I caught nearly nothing). So off to pool 7 it was. I spent much time out there but it is such a big area I feel like I only scratched the surface – however I did learn that wherever you had current and hard/rocky bottom you caught fish. It was this patterned that seems to be always producing so I tried to find it in as many places as possible. The lure they seem to be eating was on what Kevin won the Classic on and since I only had 2 I fished look alikes until the time of the tourney because I had already lost the lure twice to Pike and found it floating on the surface a short time later. Here is a picture of a 4lber that was caught – (I never knew a 4lber could look so small but when the guy holding it is over 6’5” its understandable.)



Tourney day – this particular day I had the pleasure of fishing with Josh Kepp. From the sounds of things Josh had found some fish on Pool 8 and we were going to hit his fish first and then most likely lock through to 7. Well stuff happens – when Josh put his boat in the water that morning he found that his engine would only idle and was taking the gas when he gave it the gas – so we ended up fishing for a couple hours near the ramp I managed to boat two keepers and dropped a 3rd at the side of the boat – needless to say with Josh having a heavy heart about his motor troubles his mind wasn’t in it yet at this point. So we trailered the boat to a nearby marine mechanic – What we didn’t know is they were a Mercury dealer and since Josh had an Johnson/Evinrude they weren’t much help – in fact we found the loose connection while sitting in their parking lot waiting for help. Then it was back on the water. When we got back on the second time Josh was a whole new man knowing that he wasn’t going to have to pay thousands to have a motor repaired. We went to his primary area and we immediately started to catch fish – lots of fish and lots of different kinds of fish. The fish were absolutely choking down the crankbaits, we caught a lot for numbers but there was some size too. After it slowed down a bit we tried a couple other areas nearby just to give it a rest and then we were back at the primary area again. They were still there and they were still eating decently. We played this game and sat in this place for most of the remainder of the day – we only hit one other area to speak of which landed me one good one. At the end of the day some of the current had subsided and the shad were no longer being pushed – This is when Josh caught a few of his better fish on a deeper diving crankbait, which I didn’t have any with (such is the life of a back boater)
All in all a pretty good tourney – I didn’t loose any fish that would’ve made the weigh in team and whenever you can recover from adversity and have a good showing it certainly helps. I ended up placing 11th out of 20 some and Josh who weighed in a little more than a pound than me ended up in the top 5 – weights were tight and overall it sounded like most guys had a solid tourney.