As I sat in the boat rigging up the night before the tournament, I decided that I needed to fish deeper, so my partner (Sport) and I agreed we would search for fish on the adjacent drops to where we saw and caught the best fish the previous weekend.  I tied on a 3/8oz Green Pumpkin/Brown Tru-Tungsten jig the night before and told myself that I was going to put it to use tomorrow.
 We were boat #1, so we cruised over to the flat where we saw fish last weekend, the wind was blowing in so we spent a few minutes throwing cranks & chatterbaits.  After a few minutes, we worked our way to the edge of the spring curly cabbage and Sport dropped a jig down into 8ft and caught a keeper just like that.  I quickly grabbed my jig and hopped up front to hold the boat and a few pitches later caught a 3lb bass.  Things were definitely looking up.  We continued down the edge and I busted a 14.75″ keeper and thought about tossing him back, but I didn’t.  Sport then answered by catching a nice keeper out of a weed hole near the end of a boat lift, then I pitched in there and caught a nice 16″+ fish.   Shortly there after that, Sport boated a keeper on a Rapala Hot Mustard DT6.

We continued to work our jigs, mostly deep, few fish off docks.  I probably threw 10+ keepers back after I had 4 fish in the well, trying to get a big bite, some of them were 16″ fish that I threw back.  Finally around 12:30 I busted a 3lb fish of another weed point and I was done.  Sport worked to the very last cast, & caught his fifth fish.  After I was done, I gave him my rod & reel with my jig setup and he caught them pretty good and caught two good fish to fill out his limit.  So all in all the jig pictured above, accounted for 7 of the 10 keepers weighed, several more that I did not keep as well as a dozen short fish.
  This is a picture of my first & last fish of the day, both around 3 lbs.  My total weight was 12.0lb with a 3.2lb big fish, good enough for 2nd, but first place money   Could have been better if I had not kept that 2nd small keeper, but that is part of the game when you are in a no cull tournament.

I also stormed back to win the blizzard bet with Brushhog, that will be sweet tasting when I lay my lips on it!  I also moved from 15th to 8th in the overall standings.  I also intend to duck tape my jig rod (G-Loomis 844 IMX / Shimano Castaic SF, 20lb Seaguar Flourocarbon) in my hands for the next two club tournaments on Clearwater & Chisago to make up some more ground, as I will be in Italy and not able to practice those two lakes.

Rich
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