Lake winona RABT

We kicked off the Rochester Area Bass Tour on Wednesday June 1 – we had a good showing of 9 boats and off we went – Team domination station or Mike and Ike or me and Idso ended up winning it but it started out slow. We started shallow on inside weedlines and managed one 12 inch fish – however the bluegills were there in full force spawning and I thought the fish would be there – (on a side note if someone wanted to go down there and load the boat with 10 inch gills it could be done in very short order). We fished that for an hour and then decided to head outside of the weedline – I marked a spot on the way to our starting spot where the contours looked promising. I started cranking and caught a walleye and idso poked a short fish on a beaver almost immediately. We gave this area a little more time and with nothing to show for it but bluegill pecks I then resorted to a jig worm just to see if anything was there. After a short time I felt something that was little more that a gill ripping on the tail – set the hook and immediately I saw that it was a good one – with some mad netting skills by Idso and she was in the well and nearly 4lbs!!! With 2 hours to go I knew if we could get a few more of those we would be right there – we made a small move of about 100 yards up the weedline and I got no more tugs on the jig worm and so I picked up the dropshot and cast to some of the stuff I had already fished after about 20th cast it felt heavy and the fight was on with another superior net job it was another 4lber in the boat. This one would’ve probably weighed 5 a week ago but she was very skinny from spawning. I made repeated casts to that same spot and caught yet another 4lber on the dropshot – this one was netted in mid-air as the dropshot came out of her mouth but my net man was there to tennis racket her out of the air!!!! So what if we hugged. We spent the next hour in the area with only small fish to show for it – so with 15 minutes left to go we went shallow – I threw a buzzbait over and around sunfish spawning beds and about 5 casts in had a giant blowup and the fight was on and there it was a chunky 3 ½ pounder!!!!! I kind of thought at this time we probably had it locked up but you never know in Lake Winona as the quality on this lake is at times staggering. We did indeed win with 15.5lbs and however we were not big bass winners as that went to Brent and Todd for bringing in a 5.3
slaunch donkey!!!! Next RABT is June 29th on Chester woods. Hope we have another good showing. sorry for the grainy cellphone picture

Overal the report was the that fishing was slow - usually lake winona is on fire in june but we were probably a bit early as this spring has been cold and wet. there were some nice fish caught throughout the night though.