Per the usual the pairings meeting occurred the night before day 1 of the tournament.  We had a nice meeting, dinner and raffle to raise some money for the local food shelf of Wabasha.  I even won two spools of 17lb Vicious Fluorocarbon, which is a line I use all the time!  My day 1 partner was a young guy named Josh from the host club, Zumbro Valley Bassmasters out of Rochester.  This was his first state tournament and we were boat #31 in the 2nd flight.

The weather forecast looked very good wind wise to fish Lake Pepin both days, so I was pretty excited about that.  When our boat number was let out, we turned the bow north and ran up the river and lake to the tune of a 25 minute run up Lake Pepin.  We got to my first area all, no other boats.  I caught a 16″ largemouth on a 3/8ozFall Craw Tru-Tungsten jig with a green pumpkin Rage Tail Chunk and my partner got a 15″ largemouth on a 7″ power worm.  I also caught two short fish as well.

On to the second area and Josh got a nice 15″ smallie on a Shad colored Rapala Fat Rap.  This fish really did not seem to be clicking here, so on to the next area.  I caught a 15.5″ skinny smallie on a Yellow Magic popper, but I decided to let it go.  No more bites there.  The next area I quickly caught a fat 14.5″ largemouth on a Fork Craw.  I decided I better keep that one as time was starting to be an issue.  We continued to catch several more largemouth and smallmouth but all of them short.  I started to work down the bank a ways and I caught a skinny 17″ smallie and in the box that fish went, which brought me to 3 fish.  We worked the area for a bit more, trying to get another good bite and just more short fish.  We returned to my starting spot and I caught a nice 17″ largemouth on my jig.  That gave me the tournament limit of 4 fish, so we decided to run south in hopes of getting one more bite so I did not have to weight my 14″ largemouth and to get my partner some more fish.

Then things turned sour in a hurry.  About 2 miles south of Lake City my outboard seized up   Not good, it was about 12:45pm.  So what turned into a good position of having 3 hours to get one quality bite and have a very good bag became a struggle to get in to weigh our fish.  I was able to get a hold of the tournament director and get the alternate from my club to bring me a boat. (THANKS JASON ELMES!!!)  By the time we got the boat switched, we had about 30 minutes to fish.  We tried two areas, a duck weed spot of mine and a wood & grass bank of my partners.  We had a couple bites, but never connected on anything.  We had to weigh what we had.
Try to keep my spirits high after a decent catch but a blown powerhead
My 4 fish weighed 9.37lbs, my biggest smallmouth weighed around 2.9lbs.  That put me in 29th place out of a 149 competitors, but I was less then a pound out of the top 12 cut and about 3lbs out of the lead.  I knew I was very much in this thing and if I could match my catch from day 1 on day 2, I would have a very solid change at the Top 12.  And if I could get 10-12lbs I could make a run at the top 5.

Now the trick, would be to solve my boat issue for Day 2…..

Rich
RichLindgren.com 
Rich’s Bassin’ Forum
Bass Fishing Tackle Blog