Little late on this blog, sometimes when tourneys don’t go as planned, I am less excited to hurry up and write the summary, kind of like picking at a scab.  Either way, once the blog is written, its over and it becomes history and time to look forward.

I came into the last BFL Super Tourney 6th in points for the year, so I wanted to fish this event, as I wanted to see how high I could finish in my first year fishing this circuit and learning a lot about some of these massive pools on the Mississippi River that this circuit fishes.

So far this year, I have been pretty fortunate to be able to put some solid things together for most of these tournaments on two days or less of practice.  Similar game plan, I left home fairly early on the Thursday to practice Pool 8.  I spent a bit of my morning hunting sand drops and wing dams on the main channel only to catch a few white bass, from there I started heading back into some of my favorite backwater areas to look around.  After fishing a closing dam that was loaded with small largies, I found a duckweed point that was loaded with some good fish, the first one I caught on my Evolve Nervous Walker frog was around 4lbs and I pulled on several more. I looked around more in that area and found a few more smaller packs of fish.

The rest of Thursday, I found one more duck weed area with a school of fish, plus some rock/sand points in the backwaters that were holding quality largemouth and smallmouth.  On Friday, I spent the morning trying to expand on some areas and the rest of the day I bounced around the main river, mostly striking out on wing dams, but I did find a few fish late.  Overall my practice I felt was decent, I felt pretty good about my sand points in the morning and then I though I could have a good tourney if I could get those duck weed fish to go, but knew that all could change quickly with the cooling weather.

I ended up drawing out boat 92 out of 104, which I was okay with, I thought the extra time to fish would help let my duck weed fish warm up a bit and be more patient with my fishing and rotation through my areas.  My starting area was in the raft channel area, it was small point with sand and rock with a bit of current, I quickly put 3 largemouth and 1 smallmouth in the boat on a new RoverMax 110 topwater walkiRoverMax 110 topwater walking baitng bait from Soul 5 Labs & Evolve.

My 2nd stop was a similar point to my first with a little more grass on it, the fish started to bite weird there, they wouldn’t chase a topwater or reaction  bait, but we did get some bites on C-rigs.  Although we missed more fish then we caught, they seemed to be taking the bait weird and not eating it.  I did get my 5th fish there and my co-angler got a decent smallie.

From there it just got tougher, I could go into detail, but I fished weedlines, duckweed, pads, wood, cut banks, sand drops, wing dams and never generated another keeper bite the rest of the day.  Even though almost every area I visited produced good bites in the two previous practice days.  Super frustrating to say the least!

Overall my 5 early fish weight 9lbs 10oz and put me in 59th place, but as it turned out, many other anglers in the Top 10 in points struggled as well, because I only dropped to 7th in the points.  Based on my calculations, if I could have caught  a few more good fish and finished 15th of higher, I could have won the points title, I had figured I would’ve had to win the tourney to even have a shot.  Either way, I am pretty happy that I cashed 3 of 5 checks and finished 7th in the points.  Unfortunately, fishing the regional on Kentucky Lake is not in the cards for me. sometimes you just have to put a priority on family.

Unless I jump in a local small tournament, its probably time for some much needed fun fishing for the rest of the year, and I hope to do some more videos in the near future, so be sure to subscribe to my video channel!