Catching Smallies

[bassintom]

So I fished my first tourney in about 5 years. Fished it with a good friend of mine and we won.. That's good but not the important thing here. The good stuff is how we did it. For 5 hours we were fishless except for a 6" smallie and an 8 lb. lake trout. Tourney started at 7, at 12 my partner says "what do we do now?". I said let's hit the tower and bridge support. The water around the tower is 147 ft deep and the piling is in 60+ feet of water. Water temp 55 degrees and clear skies, no wind. My 1st cast to the tower with a blade bait (chrome) nailed a 3lb2oz smallie. Within a half hour we had a 3lb 14oz and 2 about 1 1/2 to 2 lbs each and missed about 3 more. That was enough to put us over the top, everybody else was doing lousy.

Here's how we got the fish. We both were throwing blade baits at the tower and pilings and letting the bait fall to about 30 or 40 feet and we would watch the line waiting for it to stop without hitting bottom. As soon as the line stopped there was a fish there. We tried throwing other baits but the fish only wanted blade baits. Just goes to show how thinking outside the box(Zooker's theory) can produce when nothing else does. Hope this can help someone else here catch some fish. If y'all need more info, just ask.