Minnesota Bass Federation Nation TOC - Lake Pokegama

As most of you know by now I had another great showing at the State Tournament of Champions. After finishing 2nd last year I backed it up with a 3rd place this year. It was a 2 day tournament held September 10-11 with a 5 fish limit each day. My 10 fish over the 2 days weighed in at 29.24 lbs which still trailed the winner by over 5 lbs but I'm not complaining one bit. I've been fishing these state tournaments for a long time now and finally feel like I'm getting a bit of consistancy so it feels pretty good. I'll break down the tournament by day.

Day 1

Day 1 started with heavy fog but little did we now how long the delay would actually last. It ended up being a repeat of Day 2 last year with an over 3 hour fog delay. The first boats didn't start blasting off until after 10 am and since I was in the 3rd flight I didn't blast off until nearly 10:30. Being in the 3rd flight was definately an advantage though since I didn't have to be in until an hour after the 1st flight weighed in. It also worked out very nicely since I caught several of my big fish in that last hour. In these tournaments you are paired with a fisherman from another club in the state and you each keep your own 5 fish limit. Most of the time I feel it's best to work as a team though to maximize each anglers potential. I had a great partner who was catching a lot of fish in practice and I had also found a number of good areas so even with the delay I wasn't too worried about catching a limit. We decided to start on my partner's water since it was very close to the blast off area and we could see that no one had stopped on it. On my very first cast I had a big smallie come up and slash at my Spook but it never hooked up. After that the action was dead. We moved a couple hundred yards to his next area where I was able to pick up a small keeper on a watermelon red flake finesse worm but that was the only fish there. My partner then wanted to go to my water so we headed to what I felt was my best area. There were a couple small weedy humps near the mouth of a bay where I knew some good largemouth were living. I was able to pick up 2 more keepers there on my trusty watermelon jig with one of them being a good solid 3 pounder. The action wasn't nearly as fast as I was expecting though and we ended up leaving with only 3 keepers apiece. After that we ran some more of his water. All of his spots were basically the same thing. They were sharp drops where we kept the boat in 20-30 feet of water and casted up onto the break. The first one we hit I was able to put a 3 lb smallie in the boat on an olive colored X-Rap. We then ran a few more similar areas including one of his "backup" little fish spots but they were all completely void of fish. By this time it was getting later in the day and we were both short of our limits. Since none of his stuff was working we headed to another one of my areas which was a dropoff and inside corner on a large flat. Right away I started catching small keeper largemouth on my texas rigged finesse worm and had my limit. We continued down the edge and I ended up catching an unexpected bonus fish. I thought it was a largemouth area but I put another smallie in the boat that was close to 3 lbs on my finesse worm. That fish also had 8-10 other big smallies following it but we weren't able to trigger any of them. By this point we had about an hour and a half left to fish and I was feeling really good with 3 fish in the 3 lb range and 2 other solid keepers but my partner didn't have his limit yet and was getting worried. We decided to head to a spot that it turns out we had both found in practice. I knew there were some big fish there but I didn't know how many there turned out to be. I really wanted a limit before heading there because I just didn't what I could catch. It turns out that I had misjudged the area slightly and it was holding a number of big catchable fish. The area was a flat that tapered to a point with sharp drops on both sides. Again we kept the boat in about 20-30 feet of water and cast up on top of the flat. I ended up catching 2 more smallies on the X-Rap that were both over 3 lbs. One of those was around 3 1/2 lbs and actually came on my very last cast of the day. That's 2 years in a row now that I have done that in the state tournament. Those last 2 big fish pushed my limit for the day to 15.87 lbs and my partner had a solid 12 lbs. After day 1 I was sitting in 2nd place about 2 lbs behind the leader.

Day 2

Day 2 started partly cloudy so there would be no fog delay and a full 8 hours of fishing time. It was predicted to stay cloudy and windy most of the day so I wasn't sure what that would do to the fish. They seemed to bite pretty good the day before when it was calm and sunny and smallies generally seem to like the sun so I didn't know what would happen. Since I was in contention for the win my partner for the day pretty much gave me free reign to do what I wanted for pretty much the whole day. I think it was kind of a no brainer decision but I decided to start on the same spot I ended the 1st day. Almost immediately I caught a 3 lb smallie on the X-Rap and figured it was on but after almost 2 hours I was only able to put 1 more small fish in the boat. After that we went to the flat where I had found my bonus smallmouth since there were a lot of fish following it that we didn't catch the previous day. That area was kind of a bust though I did add one small keeper largemouth. Next we were off to the weedy humps. The previous day I threw a jig on them but after getting a tip from one of my club members I went with a watermelon red flake finesse worm on a dropshot. That was really the ticket and we ended up catching a number of fish in a relatively short amount of time. After culling a few times I was up to around 10 lbs and with my weight from the 1st day I knew I had made the top 12. It really takes a lot of pressure off when you know you have accomplished your goal for the tournament. That doesn't mean I was ready to quit fishing though. I was in a good position to win the tournament and I wanted it bad. By now I figured the fish on my started spot had rested enough so I headed back to that area. I fished it for another hour and was only able to catch 1 smallie on the X-Rap but it was nearly 4 lbs. That was the last fish I caught that helped me the rest of the day. For the last 3 hours of the tournament I kept rotating through areas I had found in practice and was able to catch a few smaller fish but nothing that went in the livewell. My 5 fish limit on day 2 weighed in at 13.37 lbs which dropped me from 2nd to 3rd but it's alright since I was definately not on the winning fish and like I said the main goal is just to be in the top 12. One other note from day 2 is that my dad ended up catching the biggest fish of the tournament that day. It was a giant smallmouth that weighed in at 5.67 lbs and was worth a nice chunk of change.