This past weekend we kicked off the College Fishing season with Placing 5th out of 40 teams at the National Guard College Fishing Regional Qualifier at Bull Shoals Lake. The finish earned our Bass Club 1,000 dollars and our school another 1,000 as well as a birth to the National Guard College Fishing Regional Championship.We only weighed in two keepers that edged out the 6th place team by .01lbs. I don't know whether to say that we were lucky or unlucky because our motor blew up after just 2 and a half hours of fishing which left us unable to run our pattern. I believe that we could have caught a couple more keepers if we had gotten to fish another 3 hours. We spent the last 3 hours of the day getting towed back to K Dock Marina. I am almost certain we could have won the tournament.
Who knows the amount of time we put into this tournament with our map study and finding out as much information as possible about how the lake fishes. We had a game plan going into the tournament that we would concentrate on some channel swing banks in the back of the creeks that have been known to be productive over the last couple of years. As a matter of fact the fishing reports that we saw up to the week before the tournament talked of some nice bags of fish coming from these areas.
Last week, however, we read that the bite had been dying off in the areas that we wanted to fish and we noticed by watching the weather that the wind had switched directions with the warming trend. The areas that we wanted to fish were getting hit with wind when they were producing and when the conditions started to change so did the bite. Reflecting on what was happening and looking at the weather the last couple of days leading up to the tournament we decided that we would look for cuts and secondary points that were getting the most sunshine and getting hit with the SE wind.
Out the gate we ran to a creek to fish a secondary point and found that there was already about 10 boats back in the creek but nobody was keying in on the secondary point with the channel swing that we wanted to fish. We pulled up on the point and got off to a great start as Mike was able to put keeper number one in the boat in about our first 10 minutes of fishing on a wiggle wart. I hooked up with what I though was a fish on the end of a long cast but it came off. It felt pretty solid but I don't know if it was stick or what because it wasn't swimming at all. We didn't get a bite for a couple of minutes so It was then that we decided to make the move on down lake to fish some bluff points and cuts that had been getting hit with sunshine and wind the last couple of days. We pulled up on the first cut and Mike again hooked up with a fish that stayed down. It started heading out to deeper water and all of a sudden his line went slack. We thought the fish was probably at least 4lbs but we never saw it. It could have been a walleye but what are the chances of that happening? I was convinced at this point to put the stickbait down and from then on we were pretty much both cranking.
It's smart sometimes to fish different baits until the fish tell you otherwise when you are fishing team tournaments. We pulled up on another bluff point and at this point we were both power fishing. I was able to put a nice15 and a quarter inch kentucky in the boat that had some shoulders on it. The fish jumped on my shad rap. It was getting to be about 10:30 am and we were about 2 and a half hours into the day. Mike had caught a handfull of shorts and I had gone through a short to get to my keeper.
That is when we tried to run to another point and we couldn't get the motor to start. It wouldn't turn over. Our observer tried to diagnose the problem. We tried switching up batteries and jump starting it with the trolling motor but couldn't get anything to happen. Apparently the throttle was acting a little funny as we were running down the lake in the morning so perhaps something had gone wrong there. We were about 20 miles from takeoff with about 3 hours of fishing to spare to get back to the ramp at 2pm. We hit the trolling motor on high and desperately limped our way down the bank until we found some competitors around the corner who hadn't gotten a single bite all day.
We were very fortunate that they agreed to help us out and tow us back towards the marina. Moving at a steady pace of 6 mph our day was over. As the time wore on we had to transfer our fish to the other boat and make the run back towards the dock. We had no idea that our 2 fish would get us in 5th place. We though it would take around 15 to 18lbs to get first about about 12lbs to make the top 5 cut. While we are very fortunate to end up in fifth it's frusterating to know that we might have been able to have had a big day if it wasn't for our boat troubles. That's how the cookie crumbles I guess. It's on to the next one which will be at Lake of the Ozarks March 20th. We are hoping to put on a show! Until next time keep it reel!
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