Today my tournament partner Casey and I fished our first true college fishing event. It was the first of three regional qualifiers in the northern conference, held in Virginia on Smith Mountain Lake. There were 87 boats in this tournament.
We practiced on Thursday and Friday. We assumed that this time of year there would be a lot of fish in the backs of pockets, so we planned on fishing docks, casting to cruising fish, and fishing beds if we found any. We weren't wrong about fish being in the backs of pockets, problem was that they would not even look at a bait. They were doing weird stuff, cruising, hanging out along the banks in various places that didn't make sense, and sitting on the surface in 10-20FOW in the middle of no where even though there were plenty of places for them to hide. We caught a few fish in these areas, and saw tons, but based on our experiences, we pretty much ruled this out for the tournament. On Thursday afternoon in practice, the sun was out and the wind was ripping, so we decided to try fishing some wind blown secondary points in the creeks we were in. We immediately caught fish throwing jerkbaits on points, and put together a pattern shortly thereafter. We tried different parts of the lake, and could catch fish on secondary and main lake points pretty much anywhere, but we found one creek that had a high concentration of fish following this pattern, and some nice ones mixed in too.
Friday was spent expanding our mess of waypoints in the creek we fished, and what we found gave us a lot of hope. Almost every secondary point in the creek had fish on it, I actually started throwing a bright, solid colored jerkbait so that the fish would just follow it and not bite (Clear water, bluebird skies, and they were eating a translucent bait), it showed us a lot of fish.
Tournament day started off slow, we fished for at least an hour before I finally caught a 2.5lber on a main lake point on a jerkbait. None of our secondary points produced any fish at all. Wind was pretty key to our bite, and it was plenty windy enough, so we weren't sure why we weren't getting bit. We slowed way down on one point that we knew had fish in a particular spot on it, I threw a Carolina rig to no avail, but my partner caught a 2lb smallmouth and a largemouth over 3lbs on a drop shot. We went back in a creek to one specific dock where a nice smallmouth followed my senko out when I reeled it back in during practice. On the exact same cast as I made in practice, I caught the fish, a smallmouth weighing just under 3lbs. After this we had a bit of a dry spell for at least an hour, until we went back to the same point where I caught the fish on the jerkbait, and my partner caught another around 2lbs. At this point we decided we would commit to fishing the two main lake points that we knew had lots of fish on them because we had seen them in practice (very clear water). My trolling motor is not the best, so what we ended up doing was idling up to the point up wind, and drifting across it casting jerkbaits up onto the point using the trolling motor to keep us pointed in the right direction as the wind carried us. The sun got up and the lake started white capping, this really turned the bite on. We would pretty much catch a fish on every pass across either point, so we started bouncing back and forth between the two points after every pass, and we culled a few times until we had about 12lbs. We knew we just needed one good bite, so we stayed after it, catching several 2lb fish, before I finally hooked a good one. After a nerve wracking battle in the white caps and boat wakes from all the pontoons and pleasure boats on the lake, we netted the fish, a largemouth that weighed 3 and a half pounds. We may have culled once or twice more after that, but no more than a couple ounces at a time.
When it was all said and done, we had 5 fish for 14lbs 12oz, that put us in 7th place. The top 10 qualify for the FLW College National Championship, so that's one event I have to look forward to next year! I absolutely love tournament fishing.
These were fun in practice but not so much in the tournament. Bass aren't the only creatures who like main lake points!
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