ABA - Lake Waconia, MN

This past weekend I fished in my second ABA event of the summer on Lake Waconia, MN. I have done decent on this lake in my club tournaments, so I was looking forward to this one. I knew it was probably going to take around 18-20lbs to win, so I needed to catch them pretty good.

I practiced the day before the event with a little success. I fished out deep from 7am to 12:30 with only one fish to show for my efforts. Either I don’t know how to fish deep on that lake, or the deep bite was off. So fishing towards my strengths, I went shallow pitching matted milfoil, pads, and cattails. Within an hour I had about 15lbs, made up my mind what my plan would be and left soon after that.

On tournament morning we were greeted with a stiff northwest wind that didn’t make for a pleasant take-off. After taking a few waves over the bow of the boat we were off and running. I got to my spot, put the trolling motor down, hit the power button… nothing… great start! Trying not to panic, I just buried myself in the matted milfoil and went to work with a ¾oz tungsten weight and a beaver. In about the first 45 minutes I had 4 in the box, but they were just swimmers. After an hour I decided to take another look at my trolling motor situation and finally got it working!

This gave me a boost of confidence and allowed me to settle down a little more. I moved around to the back side of the matted milfoil and continued to catch them; however, this time they were a better fish. I landed a 4lb+ and 3lb+ fish on back to back casts; those really helped my bag.

Throughout the rest of the day I continued to pick apart every square foot of the matted milfoil (which was only about 30yds X 30yds big). I culled about 10 times throughout the day with my new culling beam; that thing worked wonders. Its amazing how easy it is to pass up fish in thick cover like that, it really paid off to be extremely thorough.

At the end of the day I didn’t think I would have enough to compete for a check. However, it seemed to be a tough day for others out there too. I ended up with 14.98lbs which was good enough for 5th out of 30 boats and a small check. The deep bite seemed to be off for most and the top 5 finishers caught all their fish up shallow.

I was happy with how the day went and was excited about the 5th place finish. However, there was one thing that was very frustrating; I lost sooooo many fish in the milfoil. I’m not sure what exactly contributed to that. It could have been the massive weight that I was using, the wrong kind of hooks, or just the fact that it was extremely thick cover. I bet for every bite I got, I landed 50% of them, it was that bad. I definitely need to figure out a different rigging method for this technique, who knows what kind of bag I would have had if I landed everyone that bit…

I have another club tournament coming up this weekend on Sugar Lake near Annandale, MN. It is our last club tournament that will count towards qualifying for the 2010 state tournament. I’m not sure if there is even a chance I can qualify with the amount of tournaments I missed due to school, but I’ll be sure to let you know how it went in my next post. Have a good weekend!