Saturday, August 15th, was the 4th and final stop in the East Division of the Wisconsin Team Circuit on Long Lake in Washburn County, Wisconsin. A full field of 48 boats participated in this tournament. A few weeks ago, as luck would have it, we drew boat number 47 out of 48 for take off order for this tournament.
My tournament partner Steve Crotteau and myself spent a cumulative total of 4 days pre-fishing for this event. We entered this tournament 2nd in points in the division, with 328.64 points - the first place team of Pat Schlapper and Rob Yule had 334.19 points. Since we had a terrible boat draw, our pre-fishing hours were spent looking for new, subtle areas/spots that would hopefully yield a good bag of fish, without having a ton of competitor boat pressure. We came up with 30 plus waypoints to develop a milk run. We tried to spend time on the water in a variety of weather conditions so we could have a plan "B".
During pre-fishing, the smallmouth bite was nothing less than spectacular. More than 20 of our waypoints were smallmouth spots, with the remainder of our spots being for largemouth in a variety of depths and cover.
On tournament day we started on a smallouth spot that was actually and off-shore point that covered depths of 7' to 22' of water. We only caught 2 keepers on that spot in 1 hour and 15 minutes, and those keepers were 14" and 15.5". Spot numbers 2 and 3 were also smallmouth spots, and we caught on more smallmouth (16") and a largemouth 15.5". At this point (8:45 am) we felt that the smallmouth were not exactly on fire, and we decided to check a largemouth spot.
Over the next 1.5 hours we caught numerous keeper largemouth and we figured that we had a 14 lb 5 bass limit in the livewell. - we then started to check some smallmouth spots that did not hold numerous fish, but the quality on those spots had been phenomenal. Unfortunately, for us anyway, the smallmouth bite was off. This may have proved to be a blessing in disguise however, as it pushed us to fish for largemouth once again, and we were able to significantly improve on our limit.
Although we did catch some nice largemouth on wood, the key to our day was fishing clean sand patches approximately 6' in diameter in heavy, deep weedbeds.
Weigh-in began at 3pm at Props Sports Bar and Grill on Long Lake, which is one of our sponsors, and our total 5 fish limit weighed 15.69 lbs, which was good enough for 2nd place in this tournament. We fished clean with no lost fish and made good deciaions. More importantly we took over the points lead by approximately 10 points and were named the Top Team of the WTC East Division.
Full tournament results will be available soon by clicking Here.
Bait choices for this tournament were:
Super K football jigs in 1/4 to 1/2 ounce weights
Super K K-Plunk jigs in 1/2 ounce
Carolina Rigged soft plastics
Drop-shot rigs with soft plastics.
A special thanks to all of our sponsors!!
Grafe Auction Company
Props Sports Bar and Grill
Hauck Power Sports
Skeeter Boat Center
Crotteau Chiropractic
Super K Jigs
A&J Landscape and Maintenance
Miller Lite
Humminbird/MinnKota
Quantum