Based on my practice, I realized that winning this event would take some good fortune and the bass in my areas to grow, but I thought if I fished hard and fished clean I could put together a respectable finish and have chance to cash a check.   My practice had not been stellar, but I had found a couple of areas holding fish both on Lake Pepin and down in the top of Wabasha backwaters; plus a few back up spots if I needed a fish near Red Wing.  This tournament was a little unique, because I had never fished an event that launched out of Everts Resort on the north end of Pool 4 before.

After running south through the Wisconsin channel, I started on a rocky area of Lake Pepin, my partner had one fish on that looked to be a keeper on a spinnerbait, other then that we caught several close but short fish on finesse jigs and Fork Craws.  From there I went to my second spot on Pepin, my partner caught 1 on his spinnerbait and another on his jig.  I ended up catching 1 quality fish on a 3/8oz Tru-Tungsten PB&J jig tipped with a Green Pumpkin Rage Chunk, plus several other smaller fish.

We hit another area on the way down to Wabasha, caught several fish that were barely keepers or short on jigs & tubes, nothing we kept.  It did not take long flipping a steep bank with some wood on it in Wabasha that I caught a quality largemouth on Black/Blue Crazy Legs Chigger Craw rigged with a 3/8oz Tru-Tungsten Flipping Weight and 4/0 Super Strong Youvella Hook.  The bite was pretty slow, but when I got a fish it seemed to be decent.  I ended up catching 2 decent smallmouth on my TT jig and got a 3.71lb largemouth on a chatterbait that I had rigged up special the night before.

Tru-Tungsten Jig was my work horse & chatterbait score my kicker fish!

I had caught some decent fish on a regular chatterbait with the split tail in practice.  Because I felt I would need some bigger bites in the tournament, I upsized the trailer to a full white super fluke to give a bigger presence in the water.  Its nice when a plan pays off like that! It ended up being the 3rd biggest fish weighed on the boater side.  All my better fish came on baits that had a some moved a lot of water in the pretty dirty water that we had.

We spent some time around Red Wing trying to find my partner his 3rd fish, he had lost a couple earlier and could not get that last keeper bite at the end of the day, but we still had a great time!

I ended up with a mixed bag for 12.03lbs in 12th place out of 82 boaters, which got me a nice little check.  Kudos to my buddy Josh Douglas for winning the event with over 15lbs, by finding some really nice smallmouth!  Watch his blog for details.  I am anxious for the next tournament on June 28th, in the mean time i have a couple club tournaments to keep me busy!

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