After a long awaited wait I finally get to fish my first tournament, and as usual the weather has to play up. Snow the previous evening at registration and then a cold night. The morning was also freezing, luckily I bought heating pads at a Wal-Mart for just this. The Start was great but running 7 miles to our fishing spot on the single console Ranger sure made me miss my “Fishheadz”. I had brain freeze for 10 minutes after we stopped.
We started of fishing shallow water with top-water and I missed both my first two fish, both short striking me. The water temperature was 57 Deg F (14 Deg C) pretty cold, but the Bass were hitting the lures. After a while I changed to a Chug-bug and landed my first fish of 15.5 Inches, unfortunately not a keeper, because here we had to catch within a Slot limit. Only fish between 12 and 13 inches counted as well as fish over 16 inches, the rest have to be released. Again after I told Michi that I did not want to use is Dropshot rig, the Pro decided we were going to fish 30 – 60 foot water with dropshot. Well I had to make a plan and adapt, fishing my 10 pound bait caster that I use for Cranks as dropshot. I finally weighed in two fish wit a weight of 4 pounds, quite tough after catching 25 plus fish all around the 15 inch mark.
Again
Day Two
I was drawn with Clay Lippencott from Arizona, a walleye pro. Luckily he was lying 25th overall the previous day with both him and his co-angler getting their 5 fish limit. This made me positive, but again the weather did not look better with a cold wind blowing early already. Clay was a pitching specialist, pitching a creature bait at brush. Problem was he put his trolling motor on constant and started pitching off the front of the boat at the targets. This left me with few targets and before the lure could reach bottom at 15 ft. , my line was already being pulled around the brush. This made fishing extremely difficult from the back of the boat. I did however catch about 15 fish for the day, but all of them just short of the 16 inch mark. I weighed one fish totalling my weight for the tournament at 7-02 pounds.
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