HG Fall 2012 Tournament

Well another HG tourney has come and gone.  Common in the fall are cold fronts and boy did one blow thru Thursday/Friday.  Along with that front came about an 1″ of cold rain, and then  Friday night the high pressure moved in and cleared up the skies and brought the chilly temps.  We had hoped that the East Side, being quite dirty, would still be one of the warmest spots on the lake and we could pick up one of the 17″+ fish that we had been catching during the last couple weeks.  However, this wasn’t the case.  The rain waters were still running in and had cooled the lake almost 8 degrees in the last couple days.  This gave the fish over there lock-jaw.  We were able to get two fish to blow up at the frog. (both fish missed the frog the first pass and then hit on the 2nd go round.  They were a 13″ and 16″.    With time slowly disappearing and no fish being picked up any other way, we abandoned the east side and headed down lake.  At this point we knew the fish weren’t up on the bank like we had hoped and thus we started working the first and second depths.  I tied on a KVD squarebill crankbait and started casting.  We worked the South Shore and when we came across Blue Heron Point (I think that’s the name)  we ran into a school!  we picked up 9 of our overall 12 fish off this point and, unfortunately, as good as they were eating the KVD we couldn’t get the BIG bite we wanted.  Seeing how all the fish were between 11 and 14″ and needing something over 17.5″ for the win we headed down to the dam to try our luck dragging worms and craws.  This turned out to be the nail in our coffin!  The West end of the Lake was just absolutely dead.  (Very few measurements were even taken from this end of the lake was the rumor).  Looking back at the tourney and how the weather was playing out this made absolutely a lot of sense. Bottom line is the wind.  It played a huge impact on where I feel the fish were positioned and am just realizing that too late. With the wind blowing up the lake like it was, it forced all the bait fish ( which were feeding on a giant trico hatch from the morning) up lake who were followingthe wind blown insect corpse and the bass were right behind bait fish.  Now, what should we have done is stayed up lake.  We should have circled back a couple more times and switch up lures.  I’m sure now that the winning fish was in the school we found we just need to find the lure or the depth that it was at.  So all in all it was good day on the water and hopefully it has paved the way for a lot more fish in the future with what I learned.