Ben Woo and I left friday night for a motel in Plantagenet for the Lions tourney. We did not practice at all for this event but with the high water levels, we were confident to find the fish quickly compare to last years conditions.
We had a strong East wind in the morning but it died down a lot in the first hour of fishing. We started fishing for smallies and managed to put 2 fish in the box quickly and missed maybe 2 more. They were taking the bait very lightly and it was hard to get a good hookset on them. After about 45 mins we decided it was time to go look for largies. We had to move fast and figure out a pattern quickly... with no practice we had to try a few different patterns in order to see what the fish were doing. We spent about 15 mins on an main river outside weedline but the water was so high and dirty that we didn't think the fish were there yet. The next move was to go deep into a bay and see if we got more action there. I was tossing the frog as far as I could and Ben was flipping different type of covers until I got the first fish on the frog. This fish wasn't holding tight to any cover and was kind of just roaming so I decided to continue casting the frog around and started getting more and more bites. It wasn't long before Ben decided to do the same and we were able to put a decent limit together very quickly. We probably had around 13lbs with a few hours left to fish when we decided to go back to the smallies hoping to cull 1 or 2 smaller largies that we had.
It was a bad choice since we weren't able to find even one smallie... We then headed back into another bay close by to find a kicker fish but it was too late... Too late too even get back at the launch in time for weigh-in apparently! We didn't calculate the run back properly and got back 8 mins late good for a DQ....
Our final weight would've put us in 25th place with 13.25lbs which is a considerable improvement over last year (without the DQ obviously).
Lesson learned I guess.... Now we know exactly how long that run takes! Overall we had a very fun day though and caught a lot more fish then we usually catch on the Ottawa River... All we needed was last year's 5lbs + kicker to have a shot at a top 10.
