This is my second LBL division FLW BFL of the season and I really need to do well. The regional will be on Pickwick Lake and only the top 40 in points will be invited. I’ve kind of taken making the top 40 for granted before both because I’ve never been able to attend a regional due to other obligations and because making the top 40 has never been an issue as long as I fished all five events. With my less than stellar 48th place finish in March and my history of poor finishes in April, I was a little concerned about my point’s situation.
As I've mentioned, I havn't fished but a couple days since my last March tournament and the only thing I had to go on was what a couple of friends had told me. My buddy Zack Parker had been on KY Lake and found a school of ledge fish. Though it was strange to me that they were out there so early, it still had me chomping to go out and search for more off shore schools. My Triton had been sitting for three weeks and when I got to the water on Wednesday morning I had no power to my engine or any of my electronics. After a couple hours of digging around checking all of my wiring, I decided to take it to Odom’s Blue and Gray Marine. They checked my voltage on my Odyssey battery and it was as dead as a hammer. I was surprised because those Odyssey’s are by far the best batteries I’ve ever used and I run three graphs and leave my pumps on manual all day and have never had any loss of power. That’s when they informed me that I’d left my power on for three weeks and that had been slowly draining my battery. I took it home, plugged in my onboard charger and added an additional portable charger to give it a little boost.
Meanwhile, Zack was on his way to Paris because he had a small issue with his boat that he was going to have Blue and Gray look at Thursday morning and then he was going to start practicing for the BFL. He arrived a couple hours before dark and asked me to go out with him and check the school he’d found. We idled over the school and they were stacked in 16ft of water. He asked me if I wanted to catch some of them and I told him they were his fish so it was up to him. Well, we Sexy spooned and 6XD’d up about 30 of them in the next 15 minutes that would’ve weighed about 18lbs! I asked him why we caught so many two days before a tournament and he assured me there were plenty down there and that we weren’t going to put a dent in ‘em. After we exhausted his school, he turned the boat over to me and I scanned a few of my best river ledges. Everything was void of life but we went ahead and fished one of them for the heck of it. There wasn’t a school there but in a 20 yard stretch of ledge we caught a couple of 2.5lbers and a 4lber which was surprising as they usually don’t show up on this particular spot until July.
By Friday morning my battery was juiced up and as good as new and I headed to Paris Landing. I scanned ledges for a couple of hours and wasn’t finding anything. I finally fished some of the ledges and was able to catch a couple of 2.5lbers off of most of them but never found any groups of fish. At 10am Zack called me and said the small issue with his boat was more serious than he thought and he wasn’t going to be able to fish the BFL. He told me if I’d let him practice with me then I could fish his school during the BFL if I needed them so I picked him up and we headed back out. I had a bad feeling about the school he’d found because he’d caught them there twice but each time it was late in the day. We scanned the area at 10:30a.m. and they were nowhere to be found. We still fished the area just to see if there were any stragglers but never had a bite. We side imaged and fished everything I could think of and though we caught a couple of fish off of a lot of places, none of them were over 3lbs and none of them were schooled up. On our way back to the ramp around 6:30 we decided to verify if his school was indeed an “evening” school. I made two passes with my Humminbird and like clockwork there was a stack of them. Since we hadn’t located any other schools I’d already made up my mind to fish Barkley during the tournament so we did the only thing we could do and that was pull out a spoon and a 6XD and catch as many as we could!
I didn’t practice on Barkley because I fish the same areas every time I fish over there. I knew I was going to flip and throw a Strike King Pure Poison no matter what and with the water three feet below pool, I knew where and what the fish should be set up on. I spent Friday getting my KY tackle out of my boat and replacing it with Rodents, Pure Poison’s, spinnerbaits and KVD square billed crankbaits.
No comments:
Post a Comment