I was going to write a preview blog entry for this event on Thursday or Friday last week, but never got around to it.  My buddy Ryan & I decided to fish this Bassmaster Weekend Series event on the Winneconne/Winnebago chain to help learn this system as we had never been there before.  So we drove over on Friday afternoon to make the pairings meeting.  I was paired with Justin Newkirk from the Milwaukee area.  We were boat #6 & he told me we were fishing Bago and chasing Smallies, which I was pretty excited about.  Ryan drew boat #22 and he was headed up the Wolf River.

It took us nearly an hour to get to our first area.  I started chucking reaction baits, Vixen, RedEye Shad, & Spinnerbait across this rocky gravel & grass flat without a bite.  I then switched to dragging soft plastics with a 3/16oz Tru-Tungsten sinker, about 15 minutes later I caught my first Smallmouth.  I caught quite a few smallies on this setup and then Justin finally caught his first on a small football jig with Chompers Skirted Grub.  We stayed out on the flat until around 10-11am, we then fished our way back up the river and towards the weigh-in Winneconne.  I was able to get one really nice largemouth flipping a 3/8oz Fall Craw Tru-Tungsten Jig to finish my bag on the way back to Winneconne. 

Justin ended up with only 2 smallies & 1 Largemouth, he ended up dumping his bag, I am guessing he had about 5.5-6lbs.  My 3 fish limit weighed 6.61lbs and was good enough for 5th place.  My big fish was a 2.3lb smallmouth.  I was pretty excited to get a check on a system I had never seen before we launched on Saturday morning.   It was also my first Weekend Series tourney as a non-boater, hard to get used to fishing out of the back of a boat after being in front so many times.  Kind of cool that makes 10 out of 13 Weekend Series events that I cashed a check in!!

Sorry no pictures   It was a long drive back to Lakeville.  Had a Gopher Bassmasters Jr. Tourney on Sunday on Lake O’dowd on Sunday, I will have pictures from then

Rich
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