I served as a boat captain in one of our Jr. Bass Club tournaments this past Saturday.  I believe there was a total of 4 boats and 7 youth anglers.  I had only a single youth member, Zach Martens.  I had not been on the lake in about 10 years, and Zach had never been on the lake.  We decided to start in the slop right next to the access.  I let Zach use on of my baitcasters that was spooled up with a braid and had a black Optimum Furbit floating frog on tied on.  He had a few bites there and even caught a small keeper on it.

 

We tried the cattails for a bit, but nothing happening.  Zach then said he wanted to try some docks.  I brought him to some docks that I had caught fish way back when.  He started throwing a Watermelon Red Flake Yum Dinger he soon lost one and caught another small keeper.  He was then out of dingers, so I dug threw my plastics and let him choose from stick baits that I had in the boat.  He chose to go with a dark green Exude Comida.  He caught two keepers pretty quickly on that as well as a few shorts.  Zach was now sitting with 4 fish.

The next area we went to had some docks leading up to the pads, so he made a long cast with the Furbit and a nice bass sucked it down.  Zach did a good job of winching the fish to the boat and I scooped it into the net.  That ended up being the big fish of the tourney, it was somewhere around 3lbs.  We fished a few more docks, and Zach lost two and made a two upgrades on the Exude Comida.

His final weight was 8.0lbs even, and he weighed the only limit out of 7 anglers.  Considering the algae green water and the high sun, the anglers did a good job getting the fish they did and everyone weighed fish.   Our club had a banquet and we had a good time.  The person that dropped me in the water, accidentally left my keys at their house when they went home during the tourney, so I got to go fishing for about 90 minutes or so.  It was kind of fun just to go fun fishing.  It has been awhile since I had been out fishing when I was not practicing for or fishing a tournament.  Don’t get me wrong, fishing is always fun!

I went out and worked docks the whole time, I ended up catching 12 or 13 bass most of them keepers, all on a 3/8oz Fall Craw Tru-Tungsten Jigpaired with a black neon chunk.  It was a good time!  On Sunday, I went down to prefish Pool 4, so check back tomorrow for that report.