Big Bass Bonanza - Horseshoe Chain of Lakes

Sunday marked the 4th out of 5 tournaments on the Big Bass Bonanza schedule. Even though we haven't had what I would consider a good year we were still sitting in 9th place in the overall standings. We have only been in the money once but at least we have avoided major disasters. We have been in the top half of the field every time. Horseshoe was another example of this. We ended up in 19th place out of 49 teams. Our 8 fish weighed in at 13.82 lbs. The winning weight was almost 24 lbs for 8 fish. There were probably close to 20 teams that failed to weigh in a full 8 fish limit. Thats how tough the fishing was out there. After our horrible practice my dad and I were just looking to catch 8 fish and we managed to do that but it wasn't easy.

We started in one of the lakes on the chain that had a lot more vegetation than most of the lakes. There was a bunch of milfoil lining the lake and in places it was matted up pretty thick. It was a grind from the start. We didn't have a bite for over a half hour but I finally put a solid 2 pounder in the boat on a Spro Bronze Eye frog. After fishing another half hour I caught our biggest fish of the day on a tube next to some lily pads. That fish went almost 3 lbs. After that we didn't have any more bites so we ran to our next area.

The next spot we fished was kind of a bay formed by a few islands. There were docks, rocks, pads and a few logs in the water. When we pulled up another boat had already fished many of the docks we were hoping to get on. We started on the end dock and worked towards them. I caught 2 keepers off of the 3 docks we got to fish. Then we turned around and fished some nearby docks that didn't produce at all during practice but I managed to catch a 12 inch smallmouth from under a tree. Now we had 5 keepers in the boat at it was only 10 am. The day was going a lot better than expected even though most of our fish were small. Unfortunately it slowed way down for the rest of the day.

Our next stops were several slop areas that we really liked but they had already been fished by other boats. We went in there anyway but struck out on both. After that we decided to go back to our starting spot and my dad picked up a keeper on a white swim jig but that was the only fish we caught there so we headed back to our 2nd spot again. This time I managed 2 more keepers. One on a tube in some shoreline weeds and one on a jig flipped in the pads. We had managed to catch a limit. Even though it was pretty small we felt pretty good since it was only noon and we had 3 more hours to fish.

The afternoon was not kind to us. We ran around hitting different places we got bit on in practice and unfortunately were not able to fish some spots because of other boats but nothing worked. Finally with about 45 minutes to go I caught a 13 incher on a frog so we were able to cull out that tiny smallie. So not only did we catch a limit we even were able to cull once!

I'm not sure what place we are in the standings after this event. I know we have dropped out of the top 10 but hopefully not too far out. The last event is on Mille Lacs and we have very little experience there but I hope we can get on something good to at least bump ourselves back up into the top 10 at the end of the year.