My dad & I fished the chain on Friday from about 6:30am until 5pm and looked at Le Homme Deu, Darling & Geneva.  We spent most of the day shallow looking at reeds, docks and shallow cabbage lines.  We caught tons of fish, but just small keepers.  Reeds and cabbage held plenty of fish, but I did not even manage one keeper of a dock.  The best baits seem to be LFT Ring Frys in natural colors, Swim Jig (brown/purple), and other natural plastics.  We also caught fish on RC1.5 crank (chart/blue), devils horse, DT6 (parrot) and other lures.  Towards the end of day we started sampling some deeper weedlines in 10-14ft where we catch our summer fish.  We started to find better fish.  At this time it seemed my thought of junk fishing shallow was not going to work out.

Day 2 Ryan from our bass club joined us on the lake and we checked some reeds in the morning and then headed deep to expand upon yesterday afternoons finds.  We caught tons of fish on all the weedlines that produced last September where I took 2nd at the MNBF TOC.  The best baits were, Jig Worms , DT6 (Parrot), Lucky Craft Flat CB DR (chart – light blue), drop shot, and a Baby Ring Frys  on a mojo rig.  Fish also caught on Swim Jigs, chart/white Cyclone Lightning Blade , XCalibur xr50 Rattle Bait  and a chart/white Spinnerbait,.  I felt pretty good as I had several spots where we found better than average keeper fish, but no kicker fish.  We checked more spots on Le Homme Deu and Geneva and then poked around Victoria and Jessie, but I did not see anything much that peeked my interest, but I did try out my new Spro Bronzeye Frog in Jessie’s pads, very nice!  We were off the lake by 3pm to get ready for the tournament and our meeting.

At the pairings meeting, I drew boat #20 out of 66 (2nd flight) and my partner was a local guy (Kevin) who had never fished a tournament before.  I told him we should catch plenty of fish, just a matter of catching some bigger ones.  So my game plan for the tournament was to check my best reed patch early hoping to that some better fish had moved in and then head to my #1 deep spot and work it over with several baits.  Because Ryan & my father had such good luck on a drop shot, I bought some 8lb Vanish to spool up a spinning rod for a drop shot rig.   As I was digging for a drop shot hook, I came across a Reaction Innovation D.S. Creature (D.S. = Drop Shot) that I had bought at Sportsman’s Warehouse in San Antonio, so I decided I would use that for my drop shot rig.  The key thing here, is that I have probably only caught about 4-5 fish on a drop shot ever and do not have much confidence in the system, so that rod started the day in my rod box.  All there was left to do was to get some sleep.

Check back for tournament story tomorrow….
Rich
www.richlindgren.com
basstournament.blogspot.com

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