NationalProStaff.com - The Highs & Lows of Tournament Fishing!

This past weekend I experience one of the greatest swing of high & low that I've ever experienced in tournament fishing. I was signed up with Danny Dunn to do the 3 one day Bassmania events held out of Trenton this past weekend. Our pre-fish went very well which sometimes can be a concern. We had plenty of quality fish going in the Bay for the Sat. & Sun. which were "Bay Only" events. The Smallies were also on out in the main lake which would play into the Monday event.

I won't go into the depressing details of our Sat. event in which we totally missed the boat, although we fished what & where we had found fish in pre-fish. When those fish didn't go (But the walleye were on fire!) we made some adjustments but the results were the same. It was the worst day that I've had in a tournament in many, many moons!

After the day was done there was really no time to dwell on the dismal finish because we had to be ready for the Sun. event. We felt that we were on the right pattern but that our fish got messed up by all the walleye pushing into those weedbeds. We planned to fish the same pattern but in different areas and were confident that we would rebound. Unfortunately Mother Nature had other plans and the Sun. event ended up being called due to extreme weather(High winds, & thunder storms). We'd have to wait another day to exact our revenge on this body of water.

I do believe that it worked to our advantage as Danny was able to spend some quality time with his family and we took in a movie matinee. Batman, The Dark Knight Rises was awesome, the best Batman movie yet but enough of the film reviews. We awoke to clear skies on Mon. with a fresh renewed vigor, ready to attack those sometime elusive Lake Ontario Smallies.

The fish that we were planning to fish were deep giving us the confidence that they wouldn't be too affected by the previous day's weather. We had 3 areas that we wanted to fish but the fish only remained in one area. We marked fish on our Lowrance HDS unit as soon as we got there but there wasn't a lot of marks and they really weren't biting too well. But as the day went on it seemed like more fish moved in and we were able to coax about 25 fish into eating out Slammers & Tubes.
There were a number of key factors, one was the Lowrance HDS units, when fishing in these deeps one can never under-estimate the importance of quality electronics. The majority of our fish came on X Zone Slammers drop shotted with an Ultra Tungsten drop shot weight. The Ultra Tungsten drop shot weight meant that we could use smaller profile weight in order to get the Slammer down to the depths that the fish were hanging out in. They also give you much better feel of the bottom. The new Simax TS Great Lakes Drop Shot rod excelled again as we had the power to set hook and control these big fish that were in depths anywhere from 26-42 FOW.

This was Danny's first experience in using these rods and when exclaimed that he would trade his two best flipping sticks for one of these... Anybody who knows Danny and how much he loves his flipping sticks will understand what this says about these rods! Our best five fish ended up weighing in at 21.30 lbs unfortunately only good enough for 2nd place as Bob & Darren Izumi weighed in 23.05 lbs. worth of Smallies. If you going to lose you might as well lose to a legend in Canadian tournament fishing and one of the reasons why I got into tournament fishing. A couple of young up-coming anglers, Neil Farlow & Tom Skreet who won sat.'s event weighed in a 7 lbs. Smallmouth to win the "Big Fish" honours as well as 3rd place. Congrats to all the money finishers!

Interestingly enough I was on a streak of 8 tournament money finishes coming into Sat. event so that ended with a thud! Hope fully this runner-up finish will be a springboard to another winning streak starting with this weekend's back to back Renegade events on Lake St. Francis!