Yeah, I pre-fished for this one just a little bit. \u00a0Often times I don’t have time to pre-fish for a club event, but I did for this one. \u00a0I went out once about 10 days before the tournament and once the day before the tournament. \u00a0It’s kind of hard for me to consider going out on a lake 10 days beforehand “pre-fishing” though. \u00a0So much changes over the course of 10 days and trying to rely on what you found 10 days prior to a tournament usually does you no good. \u00a0However, it can be good to just keep in mind how you caught them, but still focus on the conditions at hand come tournament time. \u00a0The first time I went out, I found a pretty solid pattern catching better quality fish throwing medium diving crankbaits on the rocks lining the power plant intake canal. \u00a0Once that slowed, we managed to catch them fishing a little deeper on the rocks with Texas-rigged worms.<\/p>\n
Pre-fishing the day before the tournament, I decided to not fish the disharge, intake, or the dam at all. \u00a0Those are pretty much all places I know hold fish at almost anytime on that lake. \u00a0In order to get a really big bag, I knew I would have to find some fish in some less obvious areas. \u00a0I spent the first half of the morning fishing various shorelines. \u00a0I caught a few fish here and there, but nothing terribly exciting that really stuck out to me as something to return to during the tournament. \u00a0The last half of the morning, I spent idling around offshore and fishing a few offshore spots. \u00a0I spent a lot of time checking out offshore stuff near the discharge and the intake since I know those are both areas that support large populations of fish. \u00a0I caught a few fish offshore near those areas, but again nothing very exciting. \u00a0After that, I started idling around the rest of the lake. \u00a0Finally, just before I decided to get off the lake, I found something that stuck out to me: GRASS.<\/p>\n
It was a small strip of offshore submerged grass that was sitting just off of a small ledge on the side of a main lake point. \u00a0The ledge just dropped from about 2.5 ft to 5 ft and the grass was growing in 5-7 ft of water. \u00a0It was only about 50 ft long and about 10 ft wide. \u00a0Within about 10 casts with a lipless crankbait I caught two 15-17″ fish, and then in another 10 casts with a Texas-rig, I caught another fish the same size and shook off two other bites. \u00a0While I hadn’t caught a big one there, I could tell that spot was holding a lot of fish, so I quickly left it.<\/p>\n
From there I decided to just make one quick pass through the intake canal with a crankbait to see if the fish I had been catching the past week in there were still there and biting. \u00a0In less than 10 minutes going through the intake canal making pretty haphazard casts, I caught two fish that were bigger than anything else I had caught that day, and 18″ and a 20″. \u00a0Still there, I figured. \u00a0As I headed home, I decided my plan would be to crank the obvious areas (intake, discharge, and dam) first thing in the morning hopefully before they got too beat up by other anglers since that seemed to be producing the better bites. \u00a0Once I felt like I had covered that adequately enough, then I would go to the offshore grass I had found. \u00a0I figured the grass was a much less obvious spot that likely no one would fish, and I could save that for later in the day.<\/p>\n
Tournament Day<\/strong><\/p>\n Game day didn’t work out how I planned it, but when does it ever? \u00a0That’s part of tournament fishing. \u00a0Rolling with whatever gets thrown at ya. \u00a0We got a lousy draw and ended up being the last boat out. \u00a0I figured that meant we wouldn’t be able to get into the intake first. \u00a0Not to mention the fact that there were already several other boats out on the water both just fun fishing, and I’m sure there was another club having a tournament out there.<\/p>\n Sure enough, we went to the intake first and it was already loaded with boats, so we turned around and went to the discharge to see how crowded it was. \u00a0Surprisingly enough, there was only one boat there fishing way out in front of the discharge canal. \u00a0We idled up in there, and I started throwing a Bass Pro Shops Tourney Special crankbait along the rocks in the canal. \u00a0After making one pass through the canal, I had three “keepers” tallied up on my score sheet from throwing that crankbait: an 18″, 16″, and 14″. \u00a0(Fayette is a “slot lake” which means this tournament was a paper tournament, hence the score sheet). \u00a0Not quite the quality I was catching at the intake, but it was a start.<\/p>\n As a side note… I’m actually pretty impressed with that BPS Tourney Special crankbait\u00a0for it being a “Discount Bin” bait. \u00a0Of course, I had to swap out the hooks for Mustad KVD trebles, but other than that, it makes for a pretty sweet medium diving crankbait with good action. \u00a0It’s what I was using pre-fishing the day before as well. \u00a0If you look at the photo at the bottom of the post here, it’s the bait at the bottom of the pic. \u00a0Sorry the lighting is kind of bad and makes it difficult to see the color. \u00a0It was basically a Citrus Shad kind of color.<\/p>\n Anyway, after making one pass through the discharge, I tied on a different colored BPS crankbait and decided to make another pass through. \u00a0I didn’t get anything on the next pass, but my non-boater, Tony, caught a small scoreable bass. \u00a0I decided to tie on a different color BPS crankbait and make yet another pass. \u00a0This pass failed to produce a fish for either of us, so I decided to make a move and go see if boats had cleared out of the intake at all.<\/p>\n Upon arriving at the intake, it still looked pretty crowded, so we decided to fish the dam. \u00a0We started at the end by the intake and just started covering water along the dam. \u00a0We fished a pretty long section of the dam for what must’ve been 30 minutes and didn’t get a single fish. \u00a0It was pretty surprising. \u00a0I mean, I know it got fished pretty hard by several other boats first thing in the morning, but I can usually squeak out a fish or two behind guys. \u00a0Not the case this time. \u00a0By now, we had been out of sight of the intake for quite a while, so we decided to go check it once more.<\/p>\n The actual canal still had a couple of boats in it, but some of the boats had cleared out of some of the offshore structure just outside of the intake canal. \u00a0I figured we could go fish some of that for a bit, and then we’d be in a good position to jump inside the intake canal if it freed up. \u00a0We fished some of the offshore structure by the intake for about 15 minutes with no fish, and then suddenly the boats that were in the intake canal left. \u00a0We hurried and scuttled in there to give it a go.<\/p>\n Cranked up and down the canal… nada. \u00a0Figures, it seemed like it had been hit pretty hard by everyone else all morning. \u00a0I decided to slow down and fish deeper further off the rocks (15-20 ft deep) in the canal to see if I could coax a few into biting that maybe were passed over. \u00a0We saturated that canal pretty good for what must’ve been 30-45 minutes, and managed to each catch one small scoreable fish each on the T-rigs. \u00a0Looks like the intake ain’t happening. \u00a0I think it had probably just been fished a little too hard by so many other boats so far that morning.<\/p>\n At this point, we had been fishing a few hours and other than my small morning flurry at the dishcarge, it had been a pretty slow bite. \u00a0The whole time though, I kept reminding Tony about this patch of grass that I had found the day before and that I was saving it until later on after we had hit all of the obvious areas. \u00a0There was really only one other spot I wanted to try before going to the grass bed, but as Tony and I left the intake, I saw another boat sitting on the other spot I wanted to hit. \u00a0I looked at Tony and said, “Ok, let’s go to the grass!” \u00a0I glanced at my phone to check the time and it was a little after 10:30 AM. \u00a0Awesome, we still have plenty of time.<\/p>\n As we pulled up to the grass bed, sure enough, there were no other boats around and I figured nobody had touched it yet. \u00a0After idling past it a couple of times to see it on my side imaging and throwing out a couple of marker buoys to pinpoint its exact location, we started fishing again. \u00a0I pulled out\u00a0my cranking rod with the medium diving crankbait and replaced it with my favorite lipless crankbait, a River2Sea Twin Vibe. \u00a0I think the color is called “Sardine,” but it’s basically chrome with a blue back. \u00a0On about my 4th or 5th cast to the grass, I hooked up. \u00a0It didn’t feel very big at first, but then it surfaced and I saw it was a really nice fish. \u00a0Tony quickly grabbed the net, and we got it in the boat. \u00a0It had that lipless absolutely CHOKED and it was close to a 6 pound fish. \u00a0It scored in at 22 inches. \u00a0AWESOME. \u00a0I knew this was where we were going to start taking care of business.<\/p>\n Anyway, we spent the next close to 2 hours just going back and forth on that small patch of grass. \u00a0That big one was the only one I caught on the lipless, but we caught numerous other fish primarily on soft plastic baits. \u00a0We both finished out our limits on that spot, and Tony managed to add a solid 20″ fish to his bag as well. \u00a0I caught all of my other fish at that spot on a Texas-rigged PowerTeam Lures Sick Stick, while Tony threw a few different plastics, I believe. \u00a0The water was pretty flat calm and the sun was bright, so I think that’s why the lipless crankbait bite wasn’t working that well, and fishing the T-rigs slow through the grass produced better. \u00a0I was throwing the Sick Stick on a 3\/16 oz bullet weight unpegged with a plastic bead (see pic below).<\/p>\n After we felt like we had pretty much gotten everything we were going to get from that little patch of grass, we decided to spend the rest of our time idling around looking for more grass since that is what had produced our better fish. \u00a0Tony had a few small fish in his “limit,” but I only had one small 14″ that I really wanted to get rid of. \u00a0After about 30 minutes of idling around, sure enough, we found another strip of offshore grass. \u00a0Roughly the same size as the one we had fished, but this one was in deeper water. \u00a0It was in about 9-12 ft of water. \u00a0As I idled over it, I saw a few fish on the graph suspended a foot or two over it, so I knew it had fish on it. \u00a0Tony was the first one to hook up on this grass, but he ended up breaking it off on his hookset. \u00a0Soon afterward, I boated a good fish that I think scored 18 inches, if I remember right, to cull out my last small one. \u00a0At this point we had only 40 minutes left to fish or so, so we decided that instead of spending time idling, we would just grind it out on this patch of grass. \u00a0We ended up catching a few more smaller scoreable fish, but nothing that would help our overall totals. \u00a0And then that was that.<\/p>\n When it was all said and done, we managed to take 2nd place as a team, and I scored the largest individual limit in the club with 17 something pounds. \u00a0A far cry from the 25 pounds I had set as my goal in order to have a shot at AOY, but a good finish still the same. \u00a0I’ll take it, I guess. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
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