Good Start Close Finish

I awoke to mildy cool weather Sunday morning. There was dew on the windows when I hooked up the boat and you could tell fall is right around the corner.

We considered just fishing to see if we could do decent. We haven't placed in the money at a tournament yet. We decided to go ahead and fish the tournement. We have been getting better each week we have fished it and if we get all of the fish in the boat we could walk away with some money.

As we pulled into the boat ramp about 15 minutes until the start of the tournament I saw that there were hardly any open parking spaces. There were a lot of boats there for that time of the morning. As I was paying the entry for the tournament I found out that there was another club tournament on the lake.

There was about 25 boats in our tournament and at least that in the other. With all of us on Deer Creek the water got covered pretty quickly.

We started off at a bank that we have had most of our luck on so far this season. The bass are of descent size and there are some good laydowns near the creek channel. Not long after the start of the tournament Gene was fishing one of the laydowns with a white suspending crankbait and hooked into a 2 pounder. That got us pretty excited. A little ways down the bank he hooked into another one next to a log that went about 1 3/4. We were really excited. Then Gene caught another 12 1/2 incher neer a tree base a little further down the bank. This was all by 9:30.

We were both happy that we had enterred the tournament. Gene was rubbing it in that he was catching all the fish. I really wanted to catch one.

There was another boat right behind us fishing the same bank about 50 feet behind us and another 50 feet behind them so we could not turn and fish it back. Why at the start of a tournament you would choose to fish right behind another boat is beyond me. I always want to fish fresh water at the beginning of the day. We reached a point that i had seen another boat fish so I decided to get us to another spot that we had caught decent fish. There were 2 boats there so we ventured back in the creek. We fished the bank on the way in. It looked good and I was wondering why we weren't catching anything until I saw 3 boats coming back down the creek.

Everywhere we went there were boats in all of our main places. We decided to hit a stretch of bank that had a 2 foot flat about the size of a football field. The trolling motor got us back there and we ended up catching a couple small bass and a crappie. One of the bass was 11 3/4 inches. We went back to our original area after that and caught a couple more small non keepers before the end of the tournament.

We ended up catching 7 bass (only 3 keepers), a saugeye, a crappie and a white bass in the 6 hours we fished. It was our best tournament to date. All of the other boats had worse days than usuall due to the volume of fishermen on the lake.

We ended up one out of the money with 4.61 pounds. We needed at least 2 more small fish to make the money though. It was a blast to have a chance. I wish I could have contributed to the keepers. Now I have to listen to Gene rub it in on how he outfished me. He says it doesn't happen often so he has to rub it in. He is getting a lot better as the season goes on though. He is becoming quite the bass man.