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How far is 62nd from a Top Five finish in a big tournament? About seven minutes.
To some (or maybe most), this is going to come across as coulda-woulda-shoulda, but didn't. You will point out that our 11 pounds was literally half of what it took to get in that Top 5, so obviously we were't that close. That's perfectly fine if you think that. I spent the 26 hours from Saturday at 4:30 to Sunday at 6:30 thinking that. And then I sat down to dinner with my partner and his wife and he shared just how close we had come to doing what we thought we were capable of doing when we blasted off Saturday morning from Ingall's in Decatur for the second stop of the Alabama Bass Trail North Division.
A couple of disclaimers, out of respect for the two boats who finished in the top five to whom I am referring, I am not going to say who they were, where we were or what we were doing. I am just going to say that two of the top five boats shared the exact game plan we had to the smallest detail.
A quick history lesson: last year, we had almost the exact game plan except that we had more of a general idea of the pattern because Josh and I had split the lake in half with him fishing one end and me fishing the other. He found fish, I did not. But a blown powerhead kept us from fishing and we ended up having the DQ ourselves just to get home.
This year, we decided that we would only fish above Decatur and we would combine notes later in the week and nail down our exact pattern on Friday. Most of you know how much we fish the upper end of Wheeler and this winter was easily the best winter fishing I've ever had on Wheeler. Going into this month, it wasn't about finding good spots, but finding what spots were great. You can read about some of these by clicking below:
Fishing Report for Wheeler 11/16-17/2018
Fishing Report for Wheeler 11/16-17/2018
Fishing Report for Wheeler 11/22-23/2018
Sunday, Josh had found the same school he had found last year and he had 16 pounds without beating on the fish. Basically, he caught a limit, weighed them, and moved. I took notes from the specifics of that spot and set out to replicate that on other areas that matched. The number one learning point from this spot was to not fish too shallow and to find the exact current breaks.
Wednesday, I set out with my wife to add to the pattern. First, we fished similar spots, but one or two dinks aside, similar wasn't good enough. I ran to the spot Josh had found and treated it as the control. If I got bit here, I knew they could be caught and that it wasn't weather or bite related, it was location based. Sure enough, I quickly caught three fish on a jig. Two of the three were 2.5 pounds with the third at least being a keeper. The next identical spot was about 100 yards away, so I decided to just fish down to the spot rather than use the big motor.
While drifting, I decided to fish while keeping in mind some of the pointers he had given me about the proper depth. We came upon another smaller current break that had the right features and I boated a big smallie. Interesting. Hitting spot lock, I pulled out the jig and caught two more fish off this break, both of which were more 2.5 pound spots. We kept moving.
We settled into the main reason I had chosen to come here, another break with all the right features. This spot yielded a five pound spot and a few other keepers. We ended the day with around 16 pounds, again, without sitting on any "good" spot for more than three fish or about 15 minutes of fishing.
Thursday, I brought the boat and I wanted to check one spot further down river that had all the right features. In less than an hour, I had caught 12 pounds in four fish, which was just catching two fish on two spots on back to back casts before leaving. At that point, we had two good spots and two great spots.
Friday, we decided that we would go looking for largemouth, as we hadn't caught any measuring ones and we knew that if we wanted to win, we had to find a big bite. We ran all the way to the dam to fish one spot that we had won a lot of tournaments on last year. Within five minutes, we had caught three largemouth that included one solid chunk. Moving back down river, we fished a lot of different stuff, but couldn't get bit on anything that wasn't the exact right conditions.
At blastoff, we were boat 140 and we knew that the chances of us fishing our top spot was low. Even if a boat didn't fish it right, someone was going to at least stop on that spot. We just hoped that we could get to our second spot. Sure enough, after the long ride from Decatur, there was a boat sitting on our top spot but no one on our second, so we dropped the trolling motor and went to work. Some good friends of ours pulled up behind us and we kind of shared the area. They quickly got a limit.
But there was something we hadn't considered. It was the first nice Saturday of the Spring and every bank fisherman in Morgan or Madison county was fishing where we wanted to fish. Normally, we can work around two or three of these, but not five or more and that's what we were looking at. Still, we did our best, but we couldn't make the casts we wanted, so we settled for watching the boat sitting on our best spot. They moved in and out of the water column and that really worried us. Even if they didn't catch the fish, they certainly would see them on their graph.
Around 10AM, both fishermen sat down after pulling the trolling motor up and firing the big motor and we assumed they were leaving. We quickly fired up the big motor to run, but about the time we came off plane, they cut the big motor, stood up and dropped the trolling motor again. Since they were there first, we apologized and let current wash us down to maintain the required 50 yards of separation. It became obvious that with both of us there, neither of us could fish what we wanted but neither boat was going to say anything for fear of giving something away.
The issue was that this boat already had five fish and we had one. Josh and I had a sneaking suspicion that the five they had were good because they weren't fishing nearly as hard as we were. They were just watching us and waiting for us to leave, meanwhile, their boat position kept us from making the cast we needed to make. Had we held the position, we would have been where we wanted, but common courtesy demanded we let them keep that spot, even if they may have been leaving and then deciding to stay or if they were simply re-positioning the boat due to current.
Around noon, we had to make a decision. We couldn't wait these guys out and they could afford to sit there and wait. We ran towards the dam to where we knew we could at least get a limit. Our largemouth spot had two boats on it, so we kept running. Fishing the dam, we caught our limit, but it was tiny.
Eventually, we were able to fish the largemouth spot and culled up several times, but these were small culls. We had been watching boats fish, but none of them had fished deep enough. Yet, the fish had certainly been spooked by having a boat parked on top of them. We ran into our friends again and they had 15 pounds. We weren't surprised. They knew the same stuff we knew.
We ran back down river late in the day.
Our second spot was clear of both boats and bank fishermen. At 2:45, the bite turned on and we began catching fish. They just weren't getting much bigger, though we culled five or six times. After sitting there all day, the other boat had to leave to make weigh in, which gave us about five minutes of fishing time on our spot. I made it pay with our second biggest fish of the day, but we didn't have enough time to do anything else. We weighed in 11.77 which just wasn't close to what we expected.
It was over dinner that Josh broke the news that the boat that played defense on us was a top five finisher. Our friends whom we fished along side were also a top five finisher. No hard feelings for them. I am happy to say that they are my friends and that we share a lot of respect with one another to the point that we can fish side by side and it doesn't bother either of the boats.
Going back to how I started this post: you can work and work and work. You can find the winning bag, but if you can't get there first, none of it matters. About seven minutes was the difference between winning that tournament or throwing out a stinker. 62nd isn't all that bad, but it's a far cry from our expectations. It's reality and I don't want anyone thinking that I am surprised or mad about what happened. It's just been tough for me to personally reconcile my expectations and reality because when it comes to situations like this, no amount of hardwork is going to overcome the pure dumb luck of a boat draw.
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