Silverado Pro/Am - Green Lake

The site of my first Silverado tournament was on Green Lake in Spicer, MN. I was able to leave work a little early on Friday and made it to the pre-tournament meeting right at about 4pm. I was pretty excited to get out fishing the next day knowing the kind of fish that Green Lake offered. Last year I was fortunate enough to win a pro/am event on the lake with 27 some pounds for 8 fish, mostly smallmouth, which made it even better. This year went a little different.

We lanched and took off from Melvin's at 7am. I randomly drew a younger pro for this tournament who sounded like he was on some fish, so I was pumped for the day ahead. He said he had located some crusing and spawning smallmouth and that he would be sight fishing most of the day while I would be throwing faster moving baits to pick off crusing fish.

We got to the first spot in the morning and within the first 20 minutes I landed a nice 3lb smallmouth on a booyah spinnerbait. After that fish I thought it was going to be just like last year. However, it slowed down after that. I proceed to put two more fish in the boat on a spinnerbait in the morning hours, but they were much smaller fish. We ended up moving once the sun came out to another spot where my pro had found some smallmouth up shallow. When we got to the spot, there were fish everywhere! So many fish were crusing and also some on beds, but they were unbelievably spooky, which turned out to be the story of the day.

I switched to a smoke colored grub on a ballhead jig and began swimming that in the shallows and picked up another smallmouth. So now we had 4 fish in the livewell. My pro hadn't put a fish in the boat yet and I was starting to feel bad. We were definately around a lot of fish, but he couldn't get them to commit.

Eventually we moved to some small weed clumps later in the day and caught some largemouth on weightless senkos and texas rigged plastics to fill out our limit. We ended the day only culling once and had a total of 11lbs and some change which put us around the 50th spot out of 59 boats.. The winners ended up with 22lbs and many guys had 15-19lb bags. The top guys were catching them on a variety of lures, but the key for most of them was that they were targeting prespawn fish off the first deeper breakline. So we kind of missed the boat on the whole prespawn bite, but hindsight is 20/20 and that's just how it goes sometimes.

Even though we didn't finish too high in the standings, I really did have a fun time out there. My pro wasn't a slump either, he won a Denny's Event out on Lake Minnetonka a couple weeks ago, it just didn't go our way this time. It was fun fishing with him and I learned a little bit about how to go about catching spawning smallmouth, we just didn't do much catching :).

The one thing I gained from this event was motivation. Not only motivation to do well in the next tournament, but motivation to try and fish the pro side next year. This is the premier circuit in the state right now and after that tournament I'm driven to try and be able to compete with those guys next year. I'm not saying I'm going to do well if I do compete against them (they are pretty darn good!), but I'd sure love to try. The experience was really fun fishing against the best in the state of MN. The guys running the Silverado events do a great job and are truly a class act. Overall it was pretty good experience and I'm definately ready for the next one.

Fishing Report:
I have been able to get out the last two days since the tournament on some local south metro lakes and have found that the frog bite is starting to heat up. All the fish I caught on a frog except for one, were all postspawn and skinny as rails! It was still fun to get on some topwater fish though. I've also been catching some on weightless plastics in shallow water, but I believe most of the fish are out from the bank recouping right now from the spawn in the lakes I was fishing. However I did catch two big ones that were still full of eggs that had redtails (spawning fish). I definately wasn't seeing as many fish up shallow compared to a week and a half ago though. The water temp was in the low 70s.

I still believe we are about 1 to 2 weeks behind this spring compared to most springs. Most of the time the bass are just ending their spawning rituals around bass opener; at least in the south metro lakes. However, I have learned a lot about the stages of spawning fish this spring because of the colder water temps, which has been pretty cool.

I have a couple week break from tournament fishing since I won't be at the next club event this upcoming weekend. I'll also be in Northern Wisconsin chasing some muskies, walleye, and smallmouth in about 2 weeks which should be a good time. Hopefully I'll get some fishing reports from around the metro on the blog before I leave for that trip. Thanks for reading!!