While I was grueling it out on Gville, a few guys I had helped out back home were sending me pics of GIANTS they were catching off of some of the places I'd showed them on the Sexy Dawg! I was ready to get back on KY Lake and get in on some of the action. My partner Kevin Woodside knows his way around New Johnsonville as good as anyone so he spent a couple days on that end of the pond and I spent a couple in the Danville and Paris area. Kevin informed me that the grass bite was not happening and while I wasn't getting many bites on the north end, the ones I got were definitely the right kind! We decided to make the 75 mile run north of Paris from Perryville the first day and see what happened.
DAY 1: After a chilly 75 mile run we pulled in on our first stop and it didn't take long for the action to get under way. In the first 45 minutes we had blow up after blow up on our Sexy Dawgs which was good news. The bad news was after watching 4 to 6lb fish blow our baits out of the water, jump over them, roll behind them, eat them and then pull off for 45 minutes, we had one 4lb smallmouth in the live well when we left. I thought that if we changed areas the fish may cooperate a little better but as soon as we hit the sweet spot on our second stop a 5lber jumped over my bait and never touched it! Kevin finally connected on a couple of keepers but they were just 2.5lbers. To make a long story short, when we got ready to make our voyage back to Perryville, wed' had no less than 25 blow ups and we had three fish in the boat! We pulled out our Shadalicious swimbaits and stopped on a deep school on the way back and caught a couple of 3lbers to fill our limit and then we headed to the ramp. We weighed in a very disappointing 14.61lbs but fortunate for us, the majority of the 167 boat field had struggled and we were still in the hunt going into day two.
DAY 2: After all of the action we'd seen on day one we knew we were around the right fish so we decided to make the long run north again. We started on the same place and I'd like to say they were choking it on day two but after an hour we had 9 blow ups and had another lone 4lb smallmouth in the boat! We made a short run to a stump row that I hadn't fished in awhile and a few casts in a 4lber jumped over my Sexy Dawg. A few casts later I walked it over a stump and a GIANT rolled up under it but didn't take it. At that point I was starting to think we were on an episode of PUNK'D! I'd never seen so many good fish hit a bait with that many hooks and not get hooked. After a couple of dry runs on some stretches we'd gotten bit on the first day we decided to change gears and hit the deep fish a little earlier. I went to a school we didn't have time to hit the first day and they were loaded! We caught 3 to 3.5 lbers cast after cast until we finally exhausted the school. I told Kevin I was out of ideas and turned the boat over to him for the rest of the day. We headed to some of his holes down south that have been good to him in the past and with about ten minutes to go we FINALLY caught a 5.5lber on a Sexy Dawg, it was a miracle! It did come unhooked as soon as it hit the net but hey, it was in the boat. We weighed in 18.69lbs on day two and finished 7th overall.
SUMMARY: This tournament moved into first place as the most frustrating tournament I've ever fished. 7 grand in Triton Gold money was on the line and the best of the best fishermen from the south end of the lake were competing. I really wanted to win it for the $$ and the prestige. The worse part of it all is that it only took 36lbs for two days to win and I really believe we were on enough deep fish that were willing to eat that we could've caught that much if we'd fished deep the entire tournament. Then again, when you turn 170 boats loose in the land of the giants, you don't expect only 36lbs to win, so you can't really look at it that way. We did what we thought we needed to do to win and we were around the fish to win, we'll just have to chalk this one up to the fact that it wasn't meant to be. Congrats to my buddy Keith Himes and his partner for figuring out how to put 36lbs worth of stingy top water fish in the boat and claim the win.
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