Fishing for Freedom 2015 – So Close…

Well, I fished my first tournament out of my brand new Nitro Z18, and I gotta say, the new boat is off to a pretty solid start: 2nd place out of a 275 boat field.  It was an extremely bitter/sweet experience though.  We missed the big win (and a new $30,000 boat) by a mere 0.37 pounds.  A pretty tough pill to swallow.  It seems like every year I fish this deal, I get pretty close to the win, but this was most definitely the closest I’ve been.  While getting so close to a big win is cool, that’s not the real reason I fish this tournament.  It’s about giving just a little bit back to our men and women serving in the armed forces.  I’ll talk about that in this post, too, but let’s go ahead and do a little breakdown about the fishing part of the tournament.

Pre-Fishing:  I guess you could say I pre-fished… kinda.  The weekend before Fishing for Freedom, we had a club tournament out on Belton.  This really served as my primary pre-fishing effort.  I had the largest individual bag in the club tournament with 10 something pounds.  I caught something like 11 keepers that day, with most of them being largemouths and a few smallmouths, but I missed a lot of bites from smallmouths that day.  The largemouths were coming from flatter, more brush-filled shorelines just off the main lake, and the smallmouths were coming from steeper, rockier shorelines more on the main lake.  The key was just to put the trolling motor on high and cover as much shoreline as possible.  For the first few hours, I was rotating between a buzzbait, a spinnerbait, and a River2Sea Whopper Plopper trying to figure out which bait was best.  I caught a couple on the spinnerbait and one on the buzzbait, but eventually it became clear that the Whopper Plopper was the way to go and I stuck with it for the rest of the day.

Let’s talk a bit about the Whopper Plopper.  Here it is:

It’s a hard plastic topwater bait that has a softer plastic rotating tail.  The tail is cupped causing it to rotate in the water when you retrieve it, and it gives it a buzzbait-like action on the surface.  This bait has received a lot of attention the past couple of months as it has won several national level tournaments (BASS and FLW alike).  It has actually been around for several years, and I’ve been throwing it for a few years now, but it hasn’t been until recently that it has really caught on.

Ok, so like I mentioned, it’s a topwater bait.  During the club tournament, contrary to popular bassin’ knowledge, I threw this topwater bait ALL DAY.  Not to mention the fact that the conditions were the complete opposite of what most people would consider to be a good day to throw topwater.  I was throwing this thing in 80 degree weather, bright sunshine, with hardly a cloud in the sky, and not much wind… and they were smashing it!  Popular belief has always been to throw topwaters during low-light conditions or on cloudy overcast days.  The past few years, I’ve been trying to weed that idea out of my brain, and it has paid off many times.

Anyway, as I said, I missed a lot of big smallmouth bites on it though during the club event.  I missed some largemouth, too, but most of the fish I was missing were smallmouths.  I figured it was because the smallmouths couldn’t actually get such a big bait in their mouths, but the largemouths had an easier time actually eating the bait.  I had swapped out the original stock hooks on the bait for the Mustad KVD wide gap style treble hooks.  I love those EWG trebles because they really tend to keep fish pinned to the bait better, but the fish really has to be able to engulf the bait for that to work really well.  After missing so many big smallmouth, I realized that before Fishing for Freedom, I needed to swap the EWG trebles out for round bends in hopes that the smallmouth that were swatting at the bait would hook-up.

And oh, here’s a pic of a couple of fish from my bag in the club tournament.

Well, a couple of days after the club tournament is when I went and picked up my new Nitro Z18.  I wasn’t planning on pre-fishing during the week for FFF, but I wanted to get the boat out on the water and run it around a bit to make sure everything was good before just fishing the tournament in a brand new boat I’d never been in.  I figured if I was going to be on the water, I might as well take it up to Belton to poke around a bit.  Plus I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try and test some new water other than the area of the lake that I was fishing in the club tournament.  So I went out on Wednesday and conditions were very different.  It was very windy, temps were cooler, and the sky was darkened with clouds.  I spent a few hours running around different areas of the lake staying away from where I had caught them in the club tournament.  I caught a couple of smaller fish on the Whopper Plopper, and managed a couple of small keeper largemouth by flipping a Brush Hog into brush at the very backs of creeks.  Nothing that got me very excited.  I started getting a little nervous wondering if the Whopper Plopper bite was still going to work or not.  After I had enough running around trying different areas and different techniques, I went down to the area where I caught them before.  It took less than 5 minutes of throwing the Whopper Plopper before I had a 2.5 pound smallmouth in the boat.  At that point, I figured, well, I guess it’s working, so I put my things up and got off the water.

Tournament Day: The weather forecast for the day of the tournament was ugly.  Lots and lots of rain, wind, and flash flood warnings all over the place.  Sure enough, the forecast was right.  It was pretty ugly and it was just pouring buckets of rain.  I was a bit worried that it was going to kill the Whopper Plopper bite, and I was completely prepared to scrap that and do something else if I needed to.  We pulled up to our first spot, which was a little point on the lower end that I had been catching quite a few fish off of for the past month and a half or so.  The wind was howling straight into it, the water was already up a foot or two from where it was at on Wednesday, and the shoreline was all churned up from the wind and waves.  We fished it for about 10-15 minutes, but despite having caught so many fish off of it recently, I knew the conditions just weren’t right.  That’s when I decided to seek out calmer, clearer water and see if we could make the Whopper Plopper bite happen, so we ran down to the dam which was mostly protected from the wind.

When we got there, there were already 5 or 6 other bites lined up on the dam.  There was one small stretch of the dam that was “open” though where we could squeeze in, so we took it.  I had both of us throwing the Whopper Ploppers because I wanted to see if it was going to be worth doing or not.  On about my partner’s third cast, he had a smallmouth roll on it, but didn’t hook up.  A good sign at least.  We started working our way down the dam weaving in and out of the other boats fishing along the dam.  I picked up several different baits along the dam while I had my partner keep chucking the Whopper Plopper.  When we made it to the far side of the dam, my partner hooked up and put a good 2+ pound smallmouth in the boat.  Between that and the bite he had gotten earlier, that was all I needed to see to commit to the Whopper Plopper for the rest of the day.

After that, it was just all about covering as much water as quickly as possible with the Whopper Plopper.  The wind was so bad though that we had to seek out mostly sheltered areas for it to be effective.  We just weaved in and out of boats all day, chucking and winding, and putting quality smallmouth after smallmouth in the boat.  It wasn’t red hot, but we were putting a good keeper in the boat with enough regularity to keep us going.  We didn’t catch a single largemouth all day.  The storm seemed to have shut them down and they weren’t willing to eat on top.  Luckily the smallies were willing though still.  However, I did get one bite that I’m convinced was likely a largemouth and it likely would’ve been the tournament winning fish.

Since it was raining so heavily all day, there was lots of water coming in at the backs of creeks/drains, and there was lots of flooded brush in those areas.  As we fished along the shoreline, every time that we came to an area with run-off flowing into the lake, I picked up my flippin’ stick and made just 5-10 flips in the brush right where the running water was coming in.  This did actually account for one of our smaller keeper smallmouth, but later in the day, I hooked what felt like a really nice fish by doing this.  It was one of those bites that just about knocks the rod out of your hand as soon as my bait hit the water into the bush I was flipping into.  I set the hook, my rod loaded up with a heavy fish, I saw a big boil, and then *pop!*… my line snapped.  I was flipping with 65 lb braided line with a 20 lb fluorocarbon leader and it broke the line right in the middle of my fluoro leader.  It looked like a fairly clean cut as well.  It had to have been those blasted zebra mussels that have taken over Belton.  All of the bushes I was flipping into was covered in them.  When I broke it off, I let out a groan, and just looked at my partner and said, “That was it.  That was the one we needed to win.”  Pretty devastating.

After that I had a hard time deciding if we should just keep trying to cull up on smallmouths or if we should spend the rest of our time flipping the drains/creeks for a kicker.  Ultimately, I decided to keep trying to cull up on smallmouths with the Whopper Plopper because I thought we’d have a hard time coming by another bite like the one I broke off.  In the next while, we did manage to cull out our two smallest smallmouth that I had marked with culling buoys and ended up with 5 solid smallmouth.  I was pretty happy with what we had, but I had a feeling in my gut that the fish I broke off would come back to haunt me.

Anyway, if you’re reading this blog post, you know how the story ends.  We ended up in 2nd just 0.37 pounds behind the winners.  It’s hard to be happy with 2nd place when you know you had a key missed opportunity that would have likely given you the win.  I know a lot of people probably have a hard time feeling bad for me getting 2nd place out of 275 boats and cutting a decent check, but it has definitely been a tough pill to swallow.  Plus, I’m not really asking anyone to feel bad for me.  Ha!  🙂

Yeah, there is definitely part of me that is happy about 2nd place, but there’s a much bigger part of me that’s not.  I don’t enter tournaments to get 2nd place.  There was a time in my life when I did.  I entered tournaments and just wanted to place, just wanted to get a good finish and maybe win a little money.  Well, I’m over that stage in my fishing career.  I enter tournaments and plan to win… period.

Now for me to take a minute to talk about the real purpose of entering this tournament.  I got to take a real American hero out fishing for a day and spend a day with him in my boat.  His name is Brian.  He’s 26 (27? Can’t remember for sure) and he’s been deployed twice.  I spoke with him briefly about his experience in the military, but tried to keep the focus of the day in just having fun out on the water.  He’s getting out of the military in 6 months, and I’m extremely proud of him and the great service he’s done for our country during his time in the military.  Along with all of the other men and women in our armed forces.  I’m forever in awe of what he and they continually do and the sacrifices they make for us… for you… for me.  This is what makes Fishing for Freedom and event I look forward to participating in all year long.