2nd tournament win this year

[carolina-rig-01]

Britney and I won our club tournament today with 15.88lbs and I also had big bass with a 4.53lb largemouth. The bite has been pretty tough lately with the fish in an in between pattern. They aren't in a summer pattern but haven't really got into the fall swing either. I put together a little pattern while pre-fishing and I found some fish in a few areas that were already in a fall pattern and relating heavily to baitfish. We flat wore them out today. We culled 3 or 4 times and had several keepers that didn't help us. One thing I noticed is that our fish were all fat and full of shad while most of the other fish weighed in were skinny. That tells me that we are on fish that are feeding heavily on baitfish making them more predictable while other people are not fishing around baitfish. We caught a few on buzzbaits early but Firetiger crankbaits were the deal. I caught all of my bigger fish on a Firetiger Bandit 100 crankbait and I also culled once with a swimjig while fishing some docks.

Credit where it's due:

1. Thanks to Kevin (Pro Reel) for the help in getting my Prolite reels tweaked for maximum performance. I can honestly say that we would not have won today without his help because I used to refuse to throw the Bandit 100s because they were so light and hard to throw in wind. With his help I was able to throw those baits a country mile today and that was the bait that accounted for most of our fish that we weighed.

2. Also I owe a thank you to Jrob and Cassidyta because I was needing some advice on swim jigs and they were a big help. Usually on this lake you can flat cave their heads in with a spinnerbait around shallow wood but the fish that I found have just started moving up and are still spooky so a spinnerbait was too much flash and thump and was actually scaring the fish rather than triggering bites. I figured that a swim jig would be much more subtle and the fish would probably respond better to it. I have very little experience with a swim jig. Although I have been wanting to bear down and make myself learn the technique I just hadn't got around to it yet. So I texted back and forth with Jrob and Cassidyta and seeked advice from them. With their help I was able to catch several fish today on a swim jig (Thanks Ryan for the swim jig present you sent me) and even culled once with it.

We have another tournament tomorrow so we are jacked up about the possibility to run the table this weekend.