West Central Bass League - Lake Koronis

We had our lowest turnout of the year for Wednesdays on June 30th. I think the strong winds as well as the fact that it was Koronis kept many teams from showing up. Koronis can be a great lake but since it is a little further away than most of our league lakes some people just don't have as much experience on that body of water. Even though the turnout was lower we still had 18 boats competing on what turned out to be a pretty tough night. Koronis is noted for pretty good smallmouth fishing but only 2 made it to the scales that evening and they were both brought in by my dad and I. Here are the results.

1st Ron & Joe 8.18 lbs

2nd Andy & Mike Nitchals 7.98 lbs

3rd Paul & Pete 6.61 lbs

4th Kelly & Scott 6.54 lbs

Big Bass Mike Nitchals 4.44 lbs (Smallmouth)

Before I start the fishing report I have to start making my excuse for why we lost this evening. Earlier in the day my dad and I stopped off at a lake on the way to Koronis for a few hours of fun fishing. As I was loading the boat I slipped off the trailer and crushed my chest against the winch. I didn't break anything but I was in quite a bit of pain for the rest of the evening. I didn't do any damage to my arms but the chest pain ended up affecting my hooksets later in the evening and I was not able to get much power which resulted in me losing 3 good fish. Any one of those 3 would have been enough to give us the win but that's just the way it goes I guess. I have loaded and unloading my boat 100s and 100s of times since 2005 and never had any issues like that. I guess it was due to happen someday!

Besides the lost fish our fishing for the night was very slow. We started on one of our favorite stretches of docks and trees but didn't have a bite. After that it was off to one of our favorite deep weedline areas. It was out in the wind though and extremely difficult to position the boat but we did put one small keeper in the boat on a watermelon jig. After having a tough time for largemouth we stopped on a small rocky area for smallies. Almost immediately I had a good one on but since I had a terrible hookset it pulled off right away. I never saw the fish but I know it was a good one. It seemed like the smallies might have been biting so our next stop was an area mixed with rocks and weeds. I opted for a spinnerbait this time thinking that the way smallies hit a spinnerbait I would not need a very good hookset to get them to the boat. I was wrong! I had a good one close to 3 lbs crush my spinnerbait but halfway to the boat it jumped off. My dad also lost a decent smallie on this area. Our night was going from bad to worse in a hurry!

Our next stop was another shallow rocky area in search of smallies. This time my dad connected with the big fish of the night on a KVD tube. A short while later I added a small largemouth from the same area that also came on a tube. At this point we at least had our limit and the one big one so we were feeling a lot better. The rest of the night we bounced around and I missed one more good one under a dock but we were not able to boat any fish until our last stop of the night. With about 10 minutes until check in we pulled onto a shallow weedy ridge and I was able to add a 2 lb smallie that culled out one of those tiny largemouth. With as bad as my execution was I knew we had blown the win but I didn't realize it would end up being as close as it did. That makes it hurt even more!