Our 2008 tournament season kicked off with our club tournament on Nest Lake saturday morning. I didn't get a lot of practice on the lake but I had a good idea what the fish were doing, especially the smallmouths. Most of the little practice I had I used to try to find good largemouths. I saw a lot of largemouths but the size just wasn't there for me so I decided to mostly fish smallies.
The tournament hours were 7 am to 2 pm. We actually had one of our largest turnouts for a club event with 22 anglers participating and many were glad they showed up. The fishing was fantastic. 11 people weighed in 15 lbs or more for their 5 fish limits. I was stuck in that 15 lb range for most of the day until the last 20 minutes when I culled up twice with 2 nice smallies to put me at 17.24 lbs for my limit and 1st place for the tournament. It was very close though. 2nd place had 16.9 lbs and 3rd had 16.8. My dad actually had a bigger limit than me at 16.62 for most of the day but was unable to cull up at all so he ended in 4th place. We are both in good position to make the state tournament.
Like I said earlier I mostly fished smallies, but I did make a few trips up to the shallows looking for largemouths but that didn't pan out at all. There were a lot of smallmouths up on beds but that is not my preferred way to catch them. Still when there are so many fish up you can't pass up a big one if you see it so i did catch a few bedders. I'm not sure if I even ended up weighing any of those though. My dad weighed at least one bed fish that was close to 4 lbs and maybe another one but mostly we just blind casted rocky areas in 2 to 10 feet of water. The typical Nest Lake smallmouth pattern. I ended up catching maybe 15 fish for the day and most came on my trusty Strike King KVD tube in green pumpkin. Thats a tough lure to beat for smallies in my eyes. Towards the end of the day when the action slowed I switched to a dropshot and small finesse worm. I've never actually thrown the dropshot on Nest Lake before but I'm glad I did. I ended up weighing 3 fish caught on the dropshot including those 2 in the last 20 minutes. I said I want to learn dropshotting more this year and this makes me really want to try it more often.
All in all I'd say it wasn't a bad way to start the year. Now My dad and I just need to keep it up on the next state qualifier tournament coming up on Green Lake. Today is actually Sunday and we fished the Big Bass Bonanza tournament on Lake Ida today. I'm really tired now though so I will report on that tomorrow.
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