Woke up early to get my batteries figured out and ended swapping my battery for another guy’s battery in my club!  Thanks a bunch John!  Do to change of plans and wind issues, launch was delayed until 7:30am.   Because of my fortunate draw on day 1, I was boat #73 toady, which was dead last.  My partner & I made the long haul to Boy Bay, we were not in any hurry being last boat out.  I get to my starting area that I saved for today and there were two boats already there, one on each end.  I went to put my trolling motor down and noticed the head was dangling from the cables on the head.  Not the greatest start in the world, after about 10 minutes my partner & I got it pieced & taped back together where it would work.

I could feel myself being getting little unnerved by having two boats there and having trolling motor issues two days in a row.  Not to mention one of the boats there was my buddy’s 1st partner and asked him if he could go there, my buddy politely told him he rather not, but he went there anyways and the other boats was his son.  Very classy move.  All these things racing through my mind, I told myself just to settle down and work my jig like I did all week.  5 pitches later, 4lb plus fish in the boat!!!  Now I was starting to feel good, especially since it was a long cast from that guy’s boat and he got to see the whole thing.

My partner quickly boated a good fish and we worked this area with jigs for about 4 hours and I had put together a pretty solid limit on Tru-Tungsten jigs, I figured to have pretty close to yesterday’s weight, at 11:30am.  I caught only 7 total keepers, 5 on the 1/2oz Blk/Blue and 2 on the 3/8oz Sunfish jig.  Both were paired with the new Uncle Josh Phantom Craws that I had found a couple days prior at Reeds.  I noticed my partner changed his plastic chunk 3 or 4 times during the day, I never had to do any trailer maintenance all day, which mean my jig spent more time in the water.  I also knew that I had one pretty small fish, right at 2lbs and that if could get one more 2.5-3lb+ bite, it would be huge.

At about 1pm, we decided to start running some different water, we ran some docks in Boy Bay, then ran some rice in Headquarters.  I only ended up getting one more good bite, but I somehow missed it.  We saved an hour to run from Headquarters to Horseshoe bay where the weigh-in was.  I took about 30-35 minutes it fairly high seas.  We fished  the marine next to weigh-in, we each jacked a 4lb fish in the marine, too bad they were both northerns   Got us excited anyways……

I ended up being one of the last guys to weigh, my total was 5 fish for 15.62lbs with my big fish at 4.6lbs which was my first fish of the day.  The weights dropped of quite considerably on day 2 and my bag launched me from 22nd to 4th.  Top 12 is all that really matters, as now I have qualified for my 3rd Federation Nation Northern Divisional.  It is next August on Lake Winnebago near Oshkosh, WI.  My club, Gopher Bassmasters made a nice push on day 2, up to 6th place, just need a couple more fish to get some hardware.  Hats off to my buddy Ryan Brant who had a great 2nd day and moved to 13th from the middle of the pack.  That makes him the divisional alternate, so we need someone to run out of vacation next summer so he can go   You can find the full story and results here.