You may have noticed there was no Club Tournament #3, I skipped Lake Koronis to spend the day with my wife on our 5th Wedding Anniversary.  So on to Green Lake….

When we arrived at the launch, that was my first look at Green Lake, no time to pre-fish and no prior history.  Always makes for an interesting tournament.  I did do a little research and talked to a few guys in the club to get an idea of what stage the smallmouth were in, as they are the predominant species and how most tournaments are won on this lake.  My partner Frank did get out one day on the lake, scouted out a few things but it was terribly windy that day.

We started on one of the main lake reefs in the middle of the wide open lake, the wind was already coming across pretty good.  Frank and I both started with assorted reaction baits, topwater, Ima Flit Jerkbait, etc.  Nothing doing on the reaction baits.  I then switched to dragging a Fork Craw on a Petey Rig, and was pretty quickly rewarded with a nice 2lb plus smallmouth.  We continued to work that area with soft plastic presentations and got no more bites.

We then both agreed to move to the calm side and look for some boulders or bedding smallies.  We looked at Frank’s GPS map and picked a likely area based on contours.  I pretty quickly found an isolated bed with a nice smallmouth on it.  It only took a single pitch with a Green Pumpkin Mizmo Tube to put a near 3lb smallie in the well.  Shortly after that I was rewarded with my big smallie of the day on a Bluegill Reaction Innovation Vixen topwater.  Things were looking good, as it was still in the 7am hour.  We tried to get some more topwater fish, but that did not pan out.

We then poked around in a little cut, where Frank was able to get 3 small largies on a jig and I was able to get 2 largemouth on a Mizmo Tube, one weighing 3.3lbs.  So that rounded out my limit, but the one largemouth was still pretty small.  We tried a few more things in that area, then went searching for more beds.  I then culled 2 more times with smallies off beds, both on Tubes rigged texas rigged with Tru-Tungsten 3/16oz weight, 6mm Force Bead & Smart Peg.

We kept fishing hard the rest of the day, I caught some more smallies on the Fork Craw and a nice largemouth on a 5″ BassTrix, but nothing that upgraded my limit.  Frank caught several more largemouth, but they were all short.  We really had all out fish before 10am.  We fished hard the rest of they day, but it did not work out.

Me with two nice fish and Sport Smith tallying my weight in the background
At the end of the day, i weighed 13.9lbs, but due to a livewell pump issue, I lost two fish, and set me back to 13.4lbs for 2nd place.  I also had big fish, with a 3.5lb smallmouth.  Cannot complain for first time on the lake.  I am anxious to get back there and chase smallies again when the opportunity presents itself.

Looking forward to doing some fishing on local lakes around the 4th, maybe Marion & Minnetonka
Rich
RichLindgren.com 
Rich’s Bassin’ Forum
Bass Fishing Tackle Blog