A couple weeks ago we had a boater/non-boater club tournament for our University of Iowa Fishing Team down on pool 19 of the Mississippi River out of Burlington. Each U of I member was paired up with a Lake Cooper Angling Association club member. Since it is extremely difficult to find boats to use for tournaments, the LCAA club helped us out tremendously.
I was really looking forward to this tournament because I had never fished the Miss. River this far down before and I also thought it would be a great opportunity for our U of I members to have a chance to get some experience and tips from some of the older guys that had been fishing tournaments for much longer than we had.
We (10 club members) left the Iowa City area around 4:00 am and started our trek towards Burlington, IA. After about an hour drive we arrived and got paired up with our boaters and got ready for the tournament. We launched at 7am and weighed in at 3pm.
Overcast skies and rain greeted us on tournament morning. The rain didn't let up once throughout the entire day which left for some wet anglers and rusty stored tackle box hooks at the end of the day.
Me and my partner, Tony, made about a 40 minute run down to the Montrose area of the River. We were fishing a backwater cut that was a couple degrees warmer than the main river channel. It was a really cool spot that was always replenishing throughout the day. The fish would swim by this little cut while on the main river, feel the warmer water, and swim into the cut. We went up and down about a 30 yd stretch most of the day and fished a couple other areas close by this stretch too. There was one specific laydown that would ALWAYS replenish. We would catch a fish off of it, come back 5 minutes later and catch another, it never failed and was really an awesome learning experience for spring time fishing (always replenishing in a transition area).
Tony was mainly fishing with a sweet beaver and a chatterbait. I caught all my fish on an All Terrain finesse jig in texas craw color with a green pumpkin trailer. I bet we caught close to 40 fish that day, but only 4 of them were over the length minimum of 14 inches.
We ended up weighing 4 fish for 10lbs 11oz which was good enough for 4th place out of 12 boats. The best part about this tournament was the amount of funds our club raised. We expected to raise about $400 going into the event, however, once the top finishers started donating the cash winnings to our club we ended up walking away with more than $1000.00! Its was an unbelievable event and we were greatly appreciative of the donations. It went a long way in terms of helping out with the Big Ten Championship. By the way, stay tuned, I'll be posting about the Big Ten Tourney here in the next couple days.
P.S. we ended up finishing the highest that Iowa has ever finished before! it was tough, but it worked out...
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