I fished a couple more pike tournaments on the weekend.
On Saturday was a Top Fifty Pike Series event on Lake Nippissing. Although Nippissing is a large lake, boundaries are set to level the playing field. This allows the smaller boats to compete against more expensive bass rigs. The boundaries for this event were roughly about 3 miles north and south of the Harwood Islands and as far west as you could go past the town of Lavigne.
I practiced on Friday for this event and the fishing was very tough. Some big winds a few days prior to my arrival had stirred up a lot of sediment in the water and water clarity was terrible. The key to finding fish was finding the clear water. An area west of the Lavigne bridge, was protected from the wind and had the best visibility, this area produced the most fish. A secondary area we had also produced some fish for us, but mostly in the afternoon. This area wasn’t as protected, but as the day progressed the water got clearer and the fishing improved.
As is usually the case on Lake Nippissing, a variety of spinnerbaits were the most effective baits and an inline #4 Blue Fox Vibrax with a dressed treble also caught a lot of fish even in some dirtier water. All the pike we caught were in less than 5 feet of water. We even caught a few nice walleyes in the pencil weeds on spinnerbaits. I guess they moved in shallow because of the murky water.
Congratulations to Pete Senecal and Roger Tetrault for their victory. Full results can be seen at www.topfifty.ca
On Sunday we fished the Nosbonsing Pike tournament. With all the other pike events I’ve been doing this year, I never got a chance to get out and pre-fish for this event. Unfortunately, our results proved that pre-fishing is usually necessary to have success. We only managed to get 2 fish in the boat although we did have some chances to do better. We felt like we were in the right areas but we weren’t able to figure out the right bait.
A couple guys who did figure out what to use were Marc Pitre and Mark O’Byrne. They won the event convincingly with a score of 188 inches, which I believe is a record catch for this tournament. Marc and Mark are on quite a roll lately winning the Cahce Bay pike tournament earlier in the spring and the Top Fifty Pike Series Classic last fall. Congratualtions, very impressive wins.