Very tough conditions on the lake and tons of boat traffic made pre-fishing very difficult. On the third day of practice, Fred was able to key in on a shallow top water bite using the IMA Skimmer and IMA Roumba to get a few bites. Moving into the event, day 1 brought three largemouth early, but the fifteen inch limit made it tough to find keepers. Fred noted it seemed as though the fish were almost “gasping for oxygen” and needed some type of weather event to get them going (and eating). After about 9 o’clock the top water bite was totally gone, and Fred spent the rest of the day running around trying to get another keeper without much success. With twenty minutes left on the clock, he boated keeper number four, a nineteen inch smallmouth on a drop shot in thirty feet of water in the dam area of the lake; rounding out the day.
Day Two: Fred returned to his largemouth area and boated a 3.5lb largie on his second cast. “Man it’s on now!” he thought, only to be immediately sandwiched in by two other boats that weren’t there the first day. Avoiding the crowd, he then headed to the area where he caught the smallmouth on day 1 and spent the next five hours fishing a drop shot painstakingly slow. Every time he’d set the hook and swing a fish in the boat thinking it was a 12″ keeper spot, it would turn out to be a largemouth, and short of the size limit. The limits were 15 inches for largemouth , 12 for spots and 18 for smallies. That in itself made catching a limit difficult, and proved to be the case.
Looking back, Fred noted that he would have spent more time shallow –flipping bushes and docks for bigger largemouth. Fred finished the event 36th to Tommy Biffle, who took home the trophy.
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