For whatever reason this lake has my number, but I do feel relieved that lots of teams struggled at this tournament. I am still yet to travel to the North end of the lake and fish. This was where we originally were headed and so was everyone else! That was until I saw a point that peaked my interest and so we broke off from the pack and tried the point. I am not a crowd follower! We had one short fish blow up on a frog and Dustin had a decent hit on a Texas rigged worm but no fish. So instead of following everyone else I decided we should head back towards the island. There is lots of deep water with trees and I’ve never truly figured out how to fish trees in 40 feet of water especially when it’s 40 feet of water 5 feet from the bank. I know the fish are there. I was flipping trees and trying to let my jig drop the whole way down but I’m not very patient and so I started just swimming my jig about 5 feet down and BAM! A 15″ bass hammered me! But one fish is luck so we were looking for a 2nd fish to make a pattern and wouldn’t you know… not 2 mins later doing the same thing I caught our biggest bass of the day a 3.5lber that was tagged by ISU! (more later) Now we are on to something right? Nope… as we continued up the creek arm, the duckweed and cheese mats were just too much of a draw and out comes the frog. From 9:30am to about 10:30am if you threw a frog close to a bass he would BLOW out of the water and reveal himself. On top of that he would blow up 3-4 times before finally getting hooked up. So much fun but we only managed one more keeper this way and several short fish. Unfortunately, the keeper we did catch on the frog somehow hooked itself on the bottom of the throat and was bleeding pretty bad! We cleaned the livewell water and added my favorite G-Juice additive and the fish seemed to be alright but was not great. This is the tough part because you have to decide… throw him back while they are still alive or keep em and hope they don’t die and give you a 1lb penalty. We made the decision the way the bite seemed to be going that we would keep it in hopes that we could catch 3 more fish to cull him out. Bugger made it till 1:30pm before finally expiring and we were unable to add another fish anyway so culling was out. Oh Well.
Tagged Bass Info: Bass #6531 was caught first in May on a Sunday tourney and weighted 3.9lbs. She weighed only 3.5lbs the day I caught her. Length was virtually the same at 19″ to 19.25″. Sounds like next year will conclude ISU’s study.
I try to at least learn one new thing at each of these tournaments, and I think the take away from this one is that I need to switch to a spinning rod and wacky worm more… sounded like this was a good tactic to pick up a couple of fish in the trees. I also, need to take the time to fish the North end as there has to be something that causes everyone to go there first thing! A highlight of the trip was a GIANT Musky that followed my jig all the way back to the boat and as my heart jumped out of my chest trying to decided if I wanted to hook him or not he slowly sank away solving my dilemma. But what a gorgeous fish! But even though the result wasn’t as good as we had hoped catching up with Dustin the night before breaking in his new camper was a such a blast! I do always enjoy our time together especially on the water!
Oh well… there is always NEXT YEAR and now to concentrate on Deer!!!