Thursday, September 25, 2008

National Collegiate Bass Fishing Championship - Tournament

Tournament Day 1
The first day of the tournament greeted us with overcast skies after we had practiced three days with only sun. I didn't quite know what to expect. I knew that the weather would probably help our rattle trap bite, but thought that it might hinder our other patterns.

We started off the day throwing rattle traps in the 2-5ft range around smaller sticks that lined the bank. We moved through our first spot with no keepers, but continued down the bank. Finally at 8:30 Tyler caught a decent keeper on a Berkley frenzy rattle trap. I was overjoyed at this moment mainly because I have yet to weigh in a fish in a big college tournament. We continued down the bank and I caught a solid fish on a strike king red eye shad. He nailed it right at the bank, jumped three times, and managed to stay on. We now had 2 keepers in the box by 9:00 and things were looking way better than in 2007. However, that's where our keepers would stop.

We fished our marina pattern and our boat ramp pattern with no success. I couldn't believe it; well I could kind of believe it. We needed sun on those spots for them to produce. If the sun was out, the spots would move to the edge of the boat ramp slabs and we could catch them draggin plastics. We literally made one cast on two different boat ramps in practice and caught two keeper spots right away. So after a long afternoon, we manage only 3-4lbs and were stuck in 83rd place out of 100 boats. Not quite what I was shooting for. Some of the bags that were being brought in were nuts! I definitely underestimated the quality of the fish in Lake Lewisville.

One thing I would have done differently on Day 1 would have been to slow down. The area we fished in the morning had a couple other teams on it. One of them brought 16lbs to the scales... talk about a back breaker.

Tournament Day 2
On day 2 we had a better boat draw so we were able to get to our starting spot first. We picked up a couple small keepers before the other teams got there. I saw Tarleton State coming into the area and began to back off the spot. This was the team with 16lbs the first day and I figured they earned the right to fish it and had a better shot at making the top 5 than we did. However, I found out later that a different team ended up sitting on the spot most of the day and caught a couple 3-4lb fish. Too bad for the TSU guys, but I guess that's how it goes. We back over our starting spot again, but this time we started fishing the bigger/thicker wood outside of the sticks. Right away we began catching fish, but nothing that was big enough. In practice we didn't have a single bite on the big wood, but now they were on it.

We made a big run uplake to some other bigger wood after catching some on our first spot. As we were approaching the wood I was casting the red eye shad on a main lake point. I picked up our first keeper of the day which was a 13" spot. Nothing big, but a start. I then proceeded to pitch the wood with a ribbon tail worm t-rigged. I was getting bit on a lot of the trees that I was pitching to, but they were all 13"-13.75"...too small.

After running our marina pattern and boat ramp pattern again with no success, we just began to fish new water. I ended up catching about a 3.5lb fish on my red eye shad at about 12:00 and that's the last of the keepers we would see for the day. It turned out the be a tougher day in general for many teams. 14 team zeroed on day 2, so it made me feel a little better that we got two in the boat. We moved up 8 spots to 75th for the tournament. Its not the finish I had imagined, but we did do better than last year. I really learned a lot about fishing reservoirs and was able to talk to a couple local college kids that fished the lake quite a bit. They caught all their fish in the marinas and around the thick/bigger wood.

I feel that we were around the right areas, but just didn't capitalize or fish slow enough in them. However, getting to meet and talk to pros such as Kelly Jordan, Luke Clauses, Shawn Hoernke, Jeff kriet, and Tommy Biffle is something I will never forget. We also received so many perks from the sponsors of the tournament it was crazy. Free pair of frog toggs, ranger hats, $50.00 swiss army knives, free shirts, couple packs of the new biffle-o's...the list goes on and on. If we qualify for the championship event this upcoming spring/summer, you can bet that we will be back.

Monday, September 22, 2008

National Collegiate Bass Fishing Championship - Practice

I just got back from Texas a couple days ago after a fun, but at times stressful, week. The trip down to Lake Lewisville took us 14 hours, but most of it went without a problem. I traveled down with my fishing partner (Tyler) and one other car that had another 2 person team from our school. We got down to the lake, got our licenses that night and went to bed exhausted.

Day 1 Practice:
In the first hour of practice I was already having better success than in 2007. We found some good areas and covered a lot of water. We fished the main lake and also ran all the way up the lake into the muddy water. We focused on the western part of the lake and were able to eliminate a lot of water.

Day 2 Practice:
On this day we focused on the eastern part of the lake and once again ran a lot of water. We were able to expand on what we found the day before and also figured out another pattern that was actually working in 2007. We also began to have boat motor problems on this day which was a real drag. That night we spent time with Mark Gintert from The Bass Federation in a parking lot working on my fuel lines and fuel filters until about 11:00pm. It was a god send that Mark helped us out that night, unfortunately we would find out we hadn't solved the problem.

Day 3 Practice:
On Day 3 of practice we tried to expand on what we had found the first two days. We found a couple more areas, but our day was cut short when I couldn't get my motor to start. We ended up getting towed in by Boat U.S. (good thing I'm a member!). We then took the boat to a shop to get a compression test and found out that we had a blown head gasket. Well, $140.00 later it was fixed. If it weren't for the boat motor problems this trip would have gone fairly smoothly, it was really a drag worrying about whether the motor would start. It was hard to concentrate on the task at hand, and that was finding the fish.

Our main patterns:

  • Strike King Red Eye Shad in sexy shad color

  • Dragging a storm hot craw on a football

  • Targeting areas that had sticks on the inside edge with bigger wood outside of that. You could picture it as a weedline, but it was wood instead. We were catching most of our fish in the smaller sticks, not as much in the bigger wood.

  • We also had success around marinas. I used a gamakatsu wacky head with a pink trick worm, an All Terrain Swim jig and an All Terrain senko to catch these bass that were suspended under the docks. The docks ranged from 25-40ft deep.

  • Our bonus pattern was fishing boat ramps with a shakey head, hot craw, or tube. They changed the rules this year so we could bring in 12" spots. Last year it was 14". We pulled up to two boat ramps in practice and immediately caught two good spots right were the boat ramp slab ended in about 7-12 ft of water. We figured we could bank on these areas to finish out a limit.

Picture of the Gamakatsu wacky head



I will try and post about the actual tournament in the next day or two so stay tuned!

Monday, September 15, 2008

Silverado Pro/Am - Lake Minnetonka

I fished my last silverado tournament of the year this past weekend on Minnetonka and it ended up being a pretty fun day on the water. The information about the tournament will be short and sweet due to the fact that I'm in texas right now and don't have much free time to write.

I started off the day by plunging into the water to put my pro's plug in his boat because he forgot to do it at the launch. If anyone has tried to put a plug in a bass boat while its in the water, you know that its not easy and your pretty much going to get soaked. My pro thought since I had shorts on I'd just be able to hop in, bend down a little and put the plug in. Well... three minutes later I was soaked neck to toe and had to fish in drenched boxers, rain pants, and a sweatshirt with no undershirt for the morning. Talk about being cold... I had never been so miserable to start off a tournament and to top it off I forgot that my cell phone was in my pocket. Yup, you guessed it, it no longer works...

So after a wet start, the morning bite didn't lighten up my day much more. It was slow to say the least and we pretty much caught one fish here, one fish there, with nothing to really talk about. Things finally started to pick up in the afternoon when we pulled up to a lily pad spot.

I started pitching my trusty all terrain jig and went on to stick four good fish that were all between 2-2.75lbs. My pro put a couple good fish in the boat on a spro frog and that pretty much sums up our day in terms of what we caught our wiegh fish on.

We ended up weighing 15.88lbs which was better than I expected. We finished in 19th place, which put me in 35 place out of 70 amatures for the season. Thats not the type of finish in the AOY race that I wanted to have, but its hard to dictate where you will finish fishing as an Amature and not being able to make many decisions on the water. Overall I had a tremendous time fishing the silverado's this year. Billy Hildebrand and his staff are truly class acts and run one heck of a tournament. I will hopeully be back next year!

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Quick Update

Some things to get you up to date on what's happening in my world of fishing....

On labor day I bought my first bass boat (with the gracious help of my parents). It is a 1989 Ranger 361v with a 175 horsepower Envinrude. I can not wait until next summer to use this thing!!

Tomorrow I will be driving back to Minnesota for the fourth and final Silverado Pro/Am tournament. It will take place on lake Minnetonka on Friday. If your interested, come check out the weigh in at 3:00 pm at Lord Fletchers.

After the tournament I will drive back to Iowa City on Saturday. On Sunday morning at approximately 5:00 am I will be leaving for Lake Lewisville, Texas for the National Collegiate Bass Fishing Championship. There will be 108 boats representing 56 schools from around the nation competing in this tournament!! I am excited to get down there and will also get to use my boat for the first time during that tournament too.

I have been extremely busy the past 3 weeks with school and trying to get work done before I have these tournaments. I have a couple other things to do and then its time to go fish for a week straight! Can't get much better than that!

Be sure to check my blog periodically throughout the next week as I will be giving a report from the Minnetonka tournament as well as updates from the College tournament down in Texas.