A few weeks ago I fished my last collegiate event in my college fishing career. It was the Boat U.S. National Collegiate Championship held on Lake Lewisville in Texas, just north of Dallas. I have fished this tournament for the past 3 years so you would think that I would have learned a thing or two about this lake. I have learned some things, but this lake still seems to get the best of us every year. Last year we fnished 36th out of 129 and we were looking to improve on that this year.
We had a mediocre practice for Lewisville. We were able to manage cathing a limit each day, but we were not on the fish to win the tournament or even be in the top 5. Going into the tournament I was looking for a limit each day and hoping that we would get onto something during the day that would allow us to get some bigger bites. We only had one bite in practice that was 3lbs+.
We started off day one throwing reaction baits around floating boat houses and only managed one keeper before we left the area. In practice, my tournament partner Tyler caught a solid fish off one of these docks on a swimbait, but that bite never materialized that morning. After hopping around the lake for the rest of the day we were only able to scratch out two more keeper fish and finished the day in a dismal 105th out of 150 boats.
With a not so good day one in the books, we were going to change it up big time for day two. We decided to run to some shallow bushes way up north in the lake. This was the same area we fished last year when we took 36th. In hindsight, we should have fished there on day one. The frog bite was on fire and we had our limit by 9am. The morning bite was very critical due to the fact that our bite significantly slowed down later in the day. After the weigh-in we were left in 79th place overall, about middle of the pack. We definitely expected to do better, but thats how it goes sometimes. It was a good last college tournament and I can't say enough about the organizations and sponsors that help to put this event on evey year. It is by far the best tournament I have ever fished and may ever fish, I'll definitely miss going to Texas each year. To top it off, Forest L. Wood even spoke at the banquet the night before Day 1, that was really neat to hear and see such a pioneer of our sport talk to all of us.
Now it's time to more on beyond my collegiate fishing career and try my hand at some larger tournaments in the next few years around the midwest region. My plan is to first try and find a stable job and see if I can't make this fishing thing work in the next 3-5 years. Who knows, I may get a year down the road and decide to just fish local events for the rest of my life, but right now I would love to try and make a run a doing it full time. It can't be done in one year, a plan must be set and hopefully I can make a dream come true years down the road. In any case, I'll be fishing, so it can't be that bad :)
No comments:
Post a Comment