It is tough getting up at 4am to fish a tournament but these blasts offs make it all worth while. Being team # 48 allowed us to watch this great thing happen and boy does the water get choppy when 47 other boats zing off in full throttle to get to their spots. To be honest with all of you it felt weird throwing the boat into full throttle just to shut it down 10 seconds later when we hit spot #1..lol
So 7:10am and we were in spot # 1 and first cast I get a hit. Bring in fish #1 at 7:11am and we are on the board with 1.4lbs. Fish # 2-4 came in the next 20 minutes and we were already at around 5lbs which is 1lbs short of our total last year. Jamie hits a few guys in the next hour and we have a 5 fish limit in the first hour with just over 6lbs of fish...pretty small 5 fish limit but the pressure was off and we were culling for the rest of the day. Now when culling you should always throw out the smallest weight and when you don't keep track of what fish are what by a colour code system or some other system it makes for a lot of playing around grabbing bass and weighing them to see what to throw out so before 10am we figured out a system where anything over 2lbs was in the front live well and all others in the back. Next time we will get a better system going though. So speed ahead to 11am and Jamie has picked up his socks from me carrying the load and has bagged two nice 3lbers and a few 2lbers basically culling all the fish I caught out of the boat.
The afternoon slowed down a wee bit and we tried to upgrade one last bass to get us close to 13lbs but it never happened. All bass were smaller than what we had already so we ended the day there, happy and excited to see what the outcome was.
By end of day we had a pretty decent bag of 12+lbs of bass in the boat and we were thinking top 15 for sure. Well we headed back in early for weigh in as the boat was taking on water somehow and we didn't want to sink the boat. As we waited for weigh in to open we started hearing rumblings of teams having a tough day and some not weighing in at all. So now we were getting excited...really excited..maybe a top 10 which for us amateurs would be an amazing finish. See what people don't realize is we are the typical weekend warriors that fish as much as family life can give us and maybe enter 1-2 tourneys a year just for fun and to see what they are like so finishing anywhere near the top in this throng of pro's and semi pro's was a dream come true for us both.
Well final weigh in completed and we were in heaven with our placing. 5th place out of 50 teams.....not to shabby. Best part was my entire goal was to at least beat Team Dufour and that we did.
Anyway to end this awesome rant of a post we came out with an amazing new rod supplied by the awesome Paddletails and Ed. Thanks again Ed for that great prize.
Here are some more pics of the day and our end of day pics.
Again awesome day and we will be back next year for a top three finish!!! lol
Jamie with one of the nice fish of the day
Need to work on the two fist pose James!!
Now this is a two fister pose!!
Picture of the boats all parked for final prizes
And finally the proof of our finish...The leaderboard shot!!
Well that's it..quick and dirty...Hope you all enjoyed it and till next year when our next goal is top 3 finish!! High hopes for us but hell why not!
