The long awaited and much anticipated Country on the River bass tournament finally arrived this past Saturday (8/7) and my brother and I were ready to hopefully put ourselves in the position to win the first place prize of $10,000!

After a few days of practice, we had the game plan to start off by chasing largemouth and smallmouth on the main channel and then fish the backwaters with Snag Proof frogs looking for a big kicker largemouth. Of the 106 boats in the tournament, we were boat number 101 so I was very nervous that are starting spot would have a boat on it and that it did first thing Saturday morning.

Since our first spot wasn't available to us, we made a quick adjustment and quickly put together a limit of largemouth using topwater poppers. A big key to my success using topwater baits if my Wright & McGill Tessera 6'8" topwater rod, this rod has a soft tip to give the bait good action and gives when a fish hits the treble hooked bait.

We stuck to our game plan and went looking for bigger bass and using the Bobby's Perfect Frog, we are able to catch numerous bass, but none were that 3 lb. fish in which we needed so bad. The Wright & McGill Tessera 7'2" frog rod, has become one of my favorite rods this year because I can fish a frog comfortably all day and get the bass out of the thick cover.

Our limit at the end of the was 11.19 lb's, this was not exactly what we had hoped for, but we executed perfectly all day. My last tournament on my home water is next weekend, so hopefully things will all come together.

On Sunday, I headed to Lake Minnewaska in Starbuck for the 4th stop of the 2010 Big Bass Bonanza circuit. I had a 9th place finish here last year in the Silverado Pro-Am, so I was looking forward to getting back out on the water.

We started the day targeting largemouth on a weed point and quickly got a limit of small largemouth, but this wasn't going to cut it at all. Our next plan was to look for some smallmouth and I quickly hooked up with a 3 lb. smallmouth that hit my dropshot rig and once it locked on to that TROKAR hook it wasn't coming off! We continued to fish for these brown fish and i caught some more on the drop shot and a 3/8 oz. RC Tackle Swim jig. These smallmouth came on a large flat with a mixture of grass and sand.

Despite catching 3 decent smallmouth, we still weighed in 16.27 lb.'s which put us in 18th place out of 39 teams. The good news is we only dropped down two spots in the year end standings to 7th. So the next event on August 22 on Sauk Lake is huge for us. It is very hard to think I can't fish this event, so I'll be cheering on my partner and a sub very much!!

We'll see ya next week after the annual 4-man open tournament down on my home water this next weekend.