Silverado Pro/Am - Lake Minnewaska

HOLY WIND! It was a constantly taking water over the bow, "hey come stand on the front deck so we can hold", can't hardly cast 30ft, try not to fall out of the boat kind of WIND that we faced on Saturday for the 2nd Silverado Tournament of the year. However, we stayed right in the thick of it until about 12 before my pro thought we should try and make our way to a calmer area of the lake, just so we could make it back safely. They were forecasting 55mph gusts, and we didn't want a to be a part of that. 25-35mph in the morning was good enough for us.

I may sound like I have a couple loose screws in my head, but I actually enjoyed it! It helped that we were catching fish, but my pro said "Its taken me years to just not let it frustrate me and just fish in it" until I really realized I just had to forget about it and concentrate on fishing and not on the wind.

The pattern we were on was fishing "deeper" weeds in 8-12ft of water. Right in the morning I lost a decent 14-15inch fish, but soon after, my pro landed a smaller one on a texas rigged creature bait. We fished the shallower 8ft weeds with only a couple fish to show for it. We then moved out to the 12ft area and I caught a good one that went almost 4lbs on a texas rigged strike king wild thang creature bait.

We continued to fish this area and every so often the fish would get active. At about 10:00-10:30 my pro set into a good 3lb fish, I set my rod down (my bait was still in the water), netted his fish, picked up my rod and set the hook on another fish! My pro threw back out and stuck another good 3lb fish on the next cast. Talk about a 5 minute flurry! At about 11:30 the same thing happened again when I caught 2 on back to back casts.

By now we had a decent limit and it was about 12:00. We started heading back to the calmer side so we didn't risk losing any fish making our way back if the wind got worse. We ended up fishing some reeds on the way. I caught one more 3lb fish in the reeds on an All Terrain Green Pumpkin Jig that really helped, but we still had two 2.5lb fish in the well that needed to go. My pro had on about a 3-3.5lb fish in the reeds that got off, in hindsight this fish would have put us in the money. Man, that one really hurt, but we were probably not the only ones that had something like that happen to them that day, that's just part of tournament fishing.

With one hour to go, we fished a break line out in front of the weigh-in site along with about 25-30 other boats. Yes, this was the calm side of the lake. If you wanted to, you could have watched the tournament from shore. We were able to put some smallmouth in the boat on that spot using tubes, but nothing that would help.

In the end we finished with 16.25lbs in 16th place out of 59 boats. For most of the field it was a tough day and I think the wind attributed to that (HOLY WIND!). The last spot in the money had 16.60lbs, so one more fish over 3lbs and we would have been right there.

I learned a lot in this tournament. More so about not getting frustrated with the wind. Up until then I always got mad when the wind was strong (mainly because I fish out of a smaller boat), but now I hope that I can ignore it from here on out. I went out on Sunday in the wind mainly because I was motivated to do so after this tournaments (I told you there is a couple loose screws in my head). As you may know already, the fish still bite in the strong wind! Its just being able to hold in it which is the hard part.

Did I mention that it was windy that day? :)