Last week I got a Facebook message inviting me to the Simply Fishing Marine Fall Tournament, so I called my buddy and Pan-O-Prog tournament partner Ryan Brant to see if he was game. Ryan lives in Forest Lake, so we could use his boat and I could keep mine in garage, and he was all in.
Ryan got to prefish for a few hours one evening, eliminated some water. So our plan was to fish the conditions and keep on the move until we found them. Started shallow, caught a small keeper on a SWL Buzzbait right away. Fish were small early, as we had a limit of line burners that probably wouldn’t of weighed 6lbs total.
We kept poking around shallow with Tru-Tungsten jigs , at about 11am, I finally got a nice 2 plus in the boat. Shortly after that, another solid keeper. Still not super excited, we stuck with the plan. Then at about 12:30, I finally stuck a good one, it was kind of a mad scramble, as we had to go get it and Ryan was down on the bow on his belly to get her in. This would be our kicker fish in the end. Not long after that, I got another 3.5lb on my 3/8oz Tungsten Green Pumpkin / Brown jig .
At this point, we could feel things starting to click and now felt we at least had a decent chance to get our money back. We stayed the course, pounding shallow, Ryan picked up a nice cull on a tungsten jig with about 30 minutes to go. Caught a few more fish, none of them helped us. Overall we caught at least 20 fish, but most of them were 11-13″ long.
As all the boats pulled into for weigh-in, we noticed lots of long faces, so we started to think maybe we did okay. A 12lb bag weighed in right before us and they were new leader. We then weighed our 5 and they went 14.18lbs, with a 4.5lbs big bass. We watched the rest of the bags and it appeared we had won. All the teams headed up to Simply Marine for food and final results.
Simply Fishing Marine put on a nice tournament and had a nice spread for us back at their shop, fun event and hope to fish it again next year!
For now, time for some fun fall fishing with my Dad later this week!