This past Saturday my buddy Ryan Brant and I fished the Lakeville Pan-O-Prog bass touranment  on little ol’ Lake Marion presented by the Gopher Bassmasters.  This was the first year the Gopher Bassmasters ran the Pan-O-Prog event, previously run for so many years by the Minnesota Pole Benders. 

I did get a chance to spend a little practice time out here the two weekends prior to the event.  Man it was brutal, I never caught a limit either day and only caught one deep fish.  I am kinda concerned all the weed spraying by the home owners on this lake is really taking its toll on the fishing.

Ryan & I drew boat #8 out of 40, we decided we would start shallow, because that is where we had the most bites and wanted to get to what few fresh biting fish there were, since we did not have any deep spots that we felt produced with any consistency.  Ryan quickly caught a nice keeper on a 3/8oz Tru-Tungsten jig  and I followed up by catching a quality fish on a Black Secret Weapon Lures buzzbait.  We then follwed up with 2 more nice jig fish all in about the first hour or so.  Nothing huge, but we were happy with our start.

Well things got really slow from there, about an hour later, I caught a 13″ keeper on a Tru-Tungsten jig , then we did not get our last keeper until about 45 minutes to go, I did have one other good bite that I rolled arounda  bluegill bed.  So in total, 7 keeper bites, 6 fish caught that total 14.58lbs, which on a tough bite was good enough for 3rd place.  Not pretty, but we stuck to our plan and ground out a nice check!

Check here for full results on this tourney!  Hats off to Gopher for funning an excellant tournament!  I am planning to take another crack at Lake Marion during the Celebration Church bass tournament in a couple weeks….