I only spent a few hours looking at the lake on two different mornings the week of the tournament for practice.  Lake Marion is not a big lake, so I feel like I just need to locate a few fish to start on and get a feel for what the fish are doing each year.  The Saturday before the event, the first spot I checked, I caught a 3.5lbr and my buddy Bill got 2 keepers on our first 3 casts.  As tough as Marion has been lately, I knew this would be our starting deal if we could get a good draw & be first boat there.

I was fortunate enough to draw boat #7 and we were able to get to our desired area first.  It was not lights out when we got there, it took awhile to get bit and a few casts more before Ryan got our first keeper in the boat on a flick shake.  Ryan was able to get another keeper before we doubled up and that gave us 4 fish, with three of them being pretty small.  Finally Ryan got a 3lb fish hooked up and in to the net, things were looking up.

Sunday I practiced for the Alma BFL, as I hope to keep this momentum rolling!

I only caught one keeper in practice, saw a few more and pulled on some better bites, but Josh was pulling on tons of bites and getting quality when he did lean back on one.  Check his report for the details.

We got to our best stretch and had it to ourselves, less wind and sun then in practice, but we gave it a go and got a few bites.  The bites were fairly steady throughout the day, but they never materialized into fish in the box.  Most results in torn baits with missing appendages or short fish.  It was honestly baffling to have less then a 10% hook up rate even letting the fish swim off with  your bait.

We only managed 3 fish for 7lbs and change, in retrospect, we probably should have tried finessing them off the edges, but the practice was so strong just the afternoon before and the bites were still there.  The only way to really deal with these two sub-par tourneys is to take a lesson and move on.

We found some things we really liked in our practice, but the main issue was how obvious these spots were and we had high certainty of plenty of company come tournament day.  The primary pattern we found fish in was shallow largemouth that trying to spawn or just barely on the front or backside of their annual ritual.  Our practice was pretty consistent, finding a few good fish here and there until late on Friday afternoon before tournament registration.  We found a small little boat canal all by itself that was stuffed with bass.  Josh and I both agreed it was one of the craziest things either of us had seen.  This small shallow canal, was just loaded with bass, big bass, bluegills, slab crappies, gar, in fact it looked better then most Bass Pro or Cabela’s aquariums.

After a long debate, we both agreed to roll the dice and put are eggs in the basket where we saw the huge load of fish.  We drew boat #23 out of 42, we came around the corner and thought we were first boat into this small area.  Although, there was a fishing boat catching bluegils just inside the front entrance, it also seemed water had gotten a little dirtier in this area.  We kindly asked to pass them and we got in position to start fishing slowly into this area.  As we started making our firsts casts we saw a tournament boat towards the back, obviously they ran past the front entrance and started in the back.  Fairly quickly, both Josh & I got a short and then Josh put a nice 2.7lb largemouth in the box on a Havoc Pit Boss.  Starting to feel good, another local bass boat emerged from way back fishing towards us.

Long story short, we tried to make this area work and blind fish it slowly, but dirty water, boat traffic and home owners fishing from their docks got the best of us; three hours into the tournament we still had just the one keeper.  We bailed from the area and went to fish similar structure that was also sure to be community stuff.  I quickly put a small keeper in the boat on a wacky rig (sign that things are not going well, when I am throwing a wacky rig).  We were about to get to a back area to try to catch some bedders only to find another boat leaving from there.  We continued to work these areas and tried to catch two bedders of our own, only to still have two fish with about 2 hours to go.

When things were looking super grim, I caught two decent keepers on a baby brush hog on an inside weedline.  We tried to work that area and another area like it for that fifth fish, but were stuck on four with about 90 minutes left.  We decided to live or die in our starting area, hoping some of the afternoon sun pulled more fish back into the canal that was so loaded just 24 hours earlier.  We did manage one small male sight fishing to fill our limit and setup on a couple females that just would not commit before we had to weigh-in.

Don’t forget to enter the May contest for a free $50 gift card to Sportsman’s Warehouse.