Ditto Landing Wildcat, June 9th

You may recall that two weeks ago(my last post) that we had motor problems during the tournament. It went into "limp home mode" and wouldn't operate at wide open throttle. It is a safety feature to keep people like us from destroying motors. I had thought that MAYBE it was a fuel line restriction. Those fuel lines on the older boats aren't made for ethanol, and guess what, almost ALL gas has significant amounts of ethanol.

Alas, that was not the case as Dad and I worked on it days later. We removed the heads off of the motor and found a melted poppet valve.

So, I called my good buddy Chris Lide of the Boatwrench:

(256) 880-0621
11565 Memorial Pkwy Sw
Huntsville, AL 35803

Chris hooked us up with the parts. However, I didn't have enough time to get the boat running. Luckily, my friend Walt, who went to high school with me, was wanting to fish the tournament. So, I offered to pay the entry fee and we were off!

Unfortunately, we *thought* the tournament started at 530, so when I showed up at 445, I had to RUN to pay the entry fee. Walk showed up a few minutes later, but the tournament had blasted off! We decided that we didn't want to be the last boat to the honey hole...which we had decided to go to the dam, and instead ran downriver to the Redstone Army Rec area.

My uncle is always telling me that if I ever rode in a Skeeter, I would never want to buy a Bullet. While that isn't necessarily the case..I will say this: Walt's ZX225 with a Yamaha 225 on the back, was smooth as glass at 70mph. While it doesn't do the 90mph a Bullet will do, it feels awesome at 70. It's almost worth giving up the extra 20. Almost. :-)

So, all of that to say this: The water was a TAD low. There was a minuscule amount of current being pulled, and it was in the high 90s. Excuses aplenty just to say that we couldn't buy a bite. We did catch a 3 pounder, which promptly died on us. I caught a scrapper and Walt caught a good keeper in Butler Basin on a C-Rig.

We ran up to the upper point of Hobb's island and fished the sunken bridge. At 730 or so, the bite started to turn on as both of us starting getting hits on C-rig, throwing towards the river channel from 7 feet of water. But the fish were just picking up the bait and dropping it. Almost as soon as they started hitting it, TVA dropped the water 2 feet and that was it.

I didn't stick around to see what won, but it wasn't much. I only saw 2 5 fish sacks brought in. When I left, 6 pounds was in the money..if not in first. Our two fish was a little over 4 pounds, but a half pound deduction dropped us to 3 14.

Wish I had more to say, folks!