My pro partner for the Silverado Pro-Am Championship was Earl Sharpe and we began our quest to figure out the mighty Minnetonka bass on Wednesday. We looked at numerous areas, both shallow and deep. Our goal was to locate as many areas as possible that were holding bass that were 3 lb.'s plus in size. Being that this was a championship and that catching just a limit, wouldn't prove very beneficial, our goal was to get 6 good bites come tournament day.
The highlight of pre-fishing was when I hooked into a beautiful 47 inch Muskie, this was my first big Muskie I have ever caught and boy was that fun to bring in! This Muskie along with numerous bass I caught on docks and shallow weedlines came on an RC Tackle Swim Jig both in 1/4 and 3/8 oz. size.
Last weekend in the tournament I caught some nice bass on a Texas-rigged craw and did get a few on this pre-fishing. I found it was important to use a heavy wire Eagle Claw extra wide gap hook in 4/0 or 5/0. Fishing for these bass and using heavy braided line is why I needed that heavy hook.
But I knew come tournament day, my best chance to hook into the bigger bass on Tonka, using a jig was going to be my best bet. So I rigged up a 1/2 oz. RC Tackle Jig with a RC Tackle Smallie Beaver as my trailer. Using this jig helped me get 3 of our 6 bass limit that weighed in at 16.03 lb. 6-fish limit. This put us in 5th place and being that we didn't miss or lose any bass all day, it was a great day on the water.
Congratulations to Shane Raveling and his am Jeff Ziermann for bringing in 21.62 lb.'s to win the championship!
Being my first year fishing the Silverado Pro-Am and even wetting a line on these lakes, I felt I had a successful year with a 9th place finish at Minnewaska and ending up 24th in the standings was great, but to get the chance to fish the Championship and finish 5th is truly awesome!!
I want to thank all of the Silverado sponsors for their support and help in making this tournament trail truly the best in the Midwest!!
I also want to thank all my sponsors for their support and helping me be successful in 2009: Eagle Claw, Quantum, RC Tackle, Seaguar, TRICOR Insurance.