Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Checking things out on St-Louis

June 27th, 2010

Caro and I had enough of the ottawa river and lake two mountains so we decided to go check out lake St-Louis for a change. We got on the water just before noon and headed straight for largemouths. The water is abnormaly low for this time of year but the fish are still there and biting! The first area we tried had deeper, ultra clear water and some very interesting cover. After about 30 mins and only a 2.5lbs we decided to go check some other areas that had produced some good fish in the passed. This proved to be the right decision because in less then an hour I had over 15lbs with only 4 fish!! It was fun to finally catch some decent fish... especially since most of them were caught sight fishing where I had to convince them to bite for at least 5 mins! The largies have no problem adapting to the low water levels.... Some healthy fish as you can see!

I should be back on St-Louis with my good friend Mark on thursday trying to see what the smallies are doing! :)

Tournament Day - Lion de Lefaivre

June 26th, 2010

We got there early hoping we could test a new prop seeing as the last one didn't get us out of the hole quickly enough... Sadly, the new prop didn't help. We thought that maybe it was the motor that had to be raised so we took the boat out of the water 10 minutes before blast off. We figured we didn't care to get to our spot 10 mins late if it was going to help us get out of the hole faster... We ended up losing 20 minutes for nothing since no matter what we did, it seemed to make things worse. The prop ended up being too small and was spinning to fast and didn't pick up water properly causing the motor to overheat... We couldn't go over 45mph all day on top of not being able to get out of the hole!! Hopefully everything will be setup properly for Ben's next tournament on two mountains.

We started flipping a weedline and only managed to get one small largemouth in the livewell... After about an hour we decided it was time to fill that livewell with smallies but when we got to our spots... nobody was home. We spend about an hour in an area that usually always holds a few good smallies and only caught a pike. We decided to go back to largies to see if we could find some post-spawn females that were in transition areas. Again, we caught some small fish that didn't help the cause but filled our limit... At around 2pm, Ben hooked into a monster largemouth of 5.40lbs that got us all excited but unfortunatly, we coudn't get another decent fish. We thought we might of had a chance at a lunker prize but the biggest fish of the tournament came in at a whooping 6.83lbs!!! Our total weight for 5 bass was 11 and change for a dissapointing result...

Even with all the problems we had that day we still had a lot of fun.. It was nice to see everyone and I will be attending the event again next year with hopefully better results!!

Next up is two moutains and it's going to hard!!

Practice for Lions de Lefaivre

June 23rd & 25th, 2010

Caro, my dad and I practiced on the Ottawa River for 2 days while Ben, my partner for the event, spent 2 days there as well with his boat. I spent 1 day fishing familiar water and it was hard.... We caught some fish but nothing of the size I was looking for... We spent the second day of practice trying to to find new areas that I had never been before hoping to find something but ended up eliminating water instead... Ben was confident we could bring a decent bag of smallies and then hunt for a kicker largemouth.

Nothing picture worthy!

Monday, June 21, 2010

Practice on Two Mountains for Econ-O-Bass

June 20th, 2010

I was on Two mountains today with Caro practicing for our first Econ-O-Bass tournament... The water levels are beyond low... Most places I usually fish for largies have less then 2 foot of water. We started out flipping jigs and beaver tails and Caro hooked a near 4lbs largemouth and I followed immediately with a 2.5lbs. We had only been on the water for about 30 mins and already had 2 fish.... Unfortunatly, no other fish came after that except a few walleyes... We had a W wind today at about 10-15km/h.

We then tried to go for smallies on the main river but the boat traffic was very intense and I couldn't find anything I liked... We fished rocky drop offs and shallow rocks without a single bite... I should be back on 2 mountains this week with my dad but this time we will try to fish the main lake and see if we can find some big smallies.

Season Opener and 5th place finish

June 19th, 2010

Bass fishing is finally open in QC and what a good way to start the season with a tournament! I fished my first tourney with Ben today and even though we aren't completely satisfied with our overall weight we still managed to finish 5th out of 35 teams. We knew that most of the largies had been pressured in practice so we decided to go for smallies. We knew that with the right conditions our pattern could get us around 17-18lbs. Winds were howling at 30km/h with gusts over 40 but we stuck with our plan and managed to get a little over 14lbs in a few hours. We were on Ben's new Bullet and it was only it's second time out on the water and still needs a bit of fine tuning with the motor... I can assure that once everything is finally setup.. this thing will FLY!

With 2 hours before weigh in and very little battery remaining we decided to see if maybe we could find a kicker to up our weight a little. Unfortunatly, the wind made things complicated and the batteries quickly gave up.... We had to stop fishing almost an hour before weigh in but we were confident that our 14lbs bag was going to be somewhat decent considering the strong winds everybody had to deal with.

Biggest bag that day was 17lbs of largies and we finished in 5th with 14.22lbs... Not bad for the first tourney of the year.

Now it's time to practice for the Lions the Lefaivre next weekend.