I did get out and prefish one more day for this tournament, but never got around to blogging about it, maybe because it was so lack luster  
I would have had two days, but my wonderful wife score great tickets for the Packers / Vikings game, what is a guy to do  
Quite a bit riding on this tournament, I currently stood 6th in the points for the year, the top 8 qualify for nationals and my margin over the 9th through 15th place was not that great.

Anyways, I got down to Wabasha around 3pm, which gave me about 2 hours to run around in the boat look at some water color and make a few casts.  In that short time, I was able to confirm that a couple key areas were not too muddy to fish and was able to get a couple rolls on a buzz frog back in a slop area.

I drew boat #27 out of 31 boats, total 33 boaters but they were short a few non-boater so a two sets of guys had to go boater / boater.  My partner was Pat Picciano, seemed like a good guy.  Since I got a late draw, I knew if anyone was going to go to my starting area there was no way to beat them, so we started on a quick main river rock area for about 15 minutes, caught a 13″ smallie on topwater and that was it.  We then arrived on our gravel / eel grass bar and nobody was there.  I started throwing a Yellow Magic popper and within a few casts I had a fish on.  Too bad it was a white bass, probably about 15-16″.  Pat & I proceeded to catch about 35-40 white bass and 4 smallies.  I got 3 with one about 3lbs, all on a Yellow Magic Popper, Pat got his on a Pop-R that I loaned him.

We then moved a long eel grass stretch where I had good largemouth going.  We worked the whole thing without a bite, then right at the end where it drops off, I caught about a 3lb largemouth on a green pumpkin Fork Craw.  That gave me 4 quality fish at about 11am, way better then last tournament.  I was pretty sure, one more quality bite would keep me in the points hunt and maybe even a check.  Pat & I bounced around for the next 3 hours, caught several fish, most of them on soft plastics, but the biggest was around 13.5″.

We finally made it back to the slop area that I visited the night before with about 45 minutes to go and I casted my white cane toad right into the area where I had a blow up the night before and one tried to crawl all over it, but he must of just had the tails.  I fixed my frog on the hook again, two casts later he crushed it and I winched that 2.25lb largemouth in!!!  What a relief, 5 fish.  I spent the next 30 minutes running around trying to get Pat another bite or two.  He did get a bite right next to the weigh in, but it was a short fish.

 

My total weight was 12.98lbs which put me in 5th place after Day 1, not too shabby.  In the money cut and a top 8 finish would control my own destiny for Nationals.  I going to try to get a picture of my Yellow Magic popper to post in day 2’s entry.  On the downside, my dad just needed to get one keeper to clinch his berth to Nationals and his bag was empty on Day 1.

Welcome email subscriber #47, I hope to get day 2’s entry up tomorrow.