Opening Day report

With a few weeks before our next club event, I thought it would be worthwhile to get away from the club talk for and just give a few general fishing reports. The bass catch and keep opener was last weekend and I hosted a small "buddy" tournament out at Portage Lake in Jackson. We had 7 boats in our little event that went from 7-noon and to our suprise another small club decided to do the same thing. They had 9 boats in their group and were on the lake when we got there so with a few local panfishermen thrown in for good measure, we had about 25 boats on a small lake.

The busy atmosphere was a little frustrating at first but we managed to put together a decent limit of about 10 pounds and won the event. It's always good to win your own tournament. A few other boats had limits but nothing huge, with the big fish going to my buddy Dwayne Mroczka at 4 pounds. Water temps were close to 70 degrees and we found several largemouth on beds still. Most of the smallmouth seemed to be done spawning but the largemouth eagerly hit tubes or drop-shot worm rigs when the beds were located. But the interesting thing to me was how the second place team fared. They were catching what I figured to be post-spawn fish out on a weedline with a Flick Shake worm. They probably should have won if not for a few lost fish but catching lots of keeper fish seemed to come easily on the new finess technique when everyone else struggled. I will definitely look a little closer at this new bait in the coming weeks and probably do a little field testing. But overall, it was good to finally do well in a tournament and I'm looking forward to Goguac in two weeks.