Saturday, July 16, 2011

West Central Bass League - Week 6 & Big Bass Bonanza - Lake Ida

West Central Bass League - Nest Lake - July 6th

Well it was another tough night of fishing for the West Central Bass League. Nest is usually one of the better lakes on the schedule with numbers of quality largemouth and smallmouth but they did not want to show themselves on this night. There were no smallies weighed in and 11 of the 19 teams were unable to bring in a 3 fish limit. That is just unheard of for Nest Lake. Here are the results.

1st - Jared & Tonya - 3 - 8.90 lbs
2nd - Ron & Joe - 3 - 8.88 lbs
3rd - Andy & Mike Nitchals - 3 - 8.60 lbs
4th - Paul & Pete - 3 - 8.06 lbs
5th - Scott & Kelly - 3 - 7.24 lbs

Big Bass - Mike Nitchals - 4.15 lbs

Even though we ended up in 3rd for the night it was still a struggle for us. We ended up boating only 4 keepers on the night. Our first couple of stops were areas that usually produce smallmouth for us but the action was nonexistent and after half the night was over we had not boated a fish. Finally we were able to catch 2 in the 2 1/4 lb range on back to back casts in shallow weeds from 5-7 feet deep. We decided to run this pattern the rest of the night but didn't have another bite until we got back to the area where we caught the first 2 and were able to fill out our limit with another 2 lb class fish. With about 10 minutes left before check in we hit one last spot with similar cover. 5 minutes before weigh in my dad was able to boat the big fish of the night. Catching a big fish at the very end of the night has been a trend for us this year it seems. It would be nice to catch them earlier and feel more comfortable but as long as we keep catching them I don't really care when it happens! All of our fish came on various soft plastics on Texas rigs.

West Central Bass League - Diamond Lake - July 7th

I know I've been talking a lot about the tough fishing for our West Central Bass League nights but for a change the fishing was actually really good on Diamond. Most of the 15 teams competing reported catching a lot of fish for the night and the top weights were quite impressive as well. My dad and I probably boated between 25-30 fish for the night but we were just not able to find any of the right bites and our 3 fish limit weighed in at 7.88 lbs to put us in 9th. Here are the rest of the results.

1st - Dean - 3 - 11.16 lbs
2nd - Ron & Joe - 3 - 10.50 lbs
3rd - Ross & Daryl - 3 - 10.38 lbs
4th - Grant & Tim - 3 - 9.65 lbs

Big Bass - Ross & Daryl - 4.11 lbs

Our plan for the night was to primarily target docks and trees and that is pretty much what we did all night. Like I said earlier getting bites was no problem at all but we were just unable to find any of the right bites. We did lose a couple of fish that would have moved us up in the standings but they wouldn't have been enough to get up into the money. I'm not really sure what I would do differently if I had it to do over again. Our fish ended up coming on jigs and various soft plastics.

Big Bass Bonanza - Lake Ida - July 10th

What a difference a year makes! Last year on Ida 23 lbs won but 2nd was just under 18 lbs. This year 18 lbs wasn't even in the top half of the field. I'm not sure why but the nicer fish really showed up this year. It took 22 lbs to win this year but the weights were tight all the way down the list. My dad and I weighed and 8 fish limit for 18.74 which we thought would be decent but we only ended up in 14th place out of 34 boats. This was really disappointing coming on the heels of our poor performance on Minnewaska. With 2 events to go on the circuit we are sitting in 14th place for the TOY standings. We have some work to do to get up into the top 10 to qualify for the Tournament of Champions.

There isn't a whole lot to say about the fishing on Ida. We came into the event with a specific game plan and stuck with it pretty much the entire day. That plan was to fish thicker weeds on a large flat in 8-12 feet of water and basically play the numbers game. It was difficult to pinpoint schools of larger fish so you just had to catch a number of fish and every once in awhile one would be a good one. The problem for us is that we just didn't catch enough fish. We probably caught 35 on the day but I know if we had caught 50 for the day a couple of those would have been big enough to get us into the money. We just didn't get the number of bites I was expecting. Our weigh fish ended up coming on Texas rigged Sweet Beavers and various straight tail worms rigged on a drop shot.

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