Caro and I will remember this day for a looonnng time! For once, the lake was nice with a reasonable SW wind.... it's wasn't dead calm but there was a nice ripple that wasn't going to bother the basscat one bit.
I'm not really superstitious but Caro couldn't help to notice that we had 13 rods rigged and we were August 13th.... To make things even weirder I picked #13 to launch in the morning. I didn't make anything of it but about 100 yards from my first spot I heard a noise that nobody wants to hear coming from my engine.... I slowed down and tried giving it a bit of gas once again but the noise was back and even louder. That's when I told Caro it was the end of our season.... thinking my motor had just "died". We were almost on a spot so we made a phone call to the tournament director and asked if there was anyway we could still fish and they said that I could find someone to transport my fish in a seperate livewell or get someone to tow me back to the launch (which I ended up doing).
While I was on the phone, another angler (not in the tournament) was catching big smallies less then 30ft from me and although I was a bit dissapointed I was surprise to see that the fish were "on" in this area. When I got everything confirmed with the tournament director I started fishing the area thoroughly as I had no where else to go. The first fish to hit my wacky worm was my biggest fish of the year at 5.4lbs.... A beautiful smallmouth that made me forget about my motor for a few minutes.... Moving around with my trolling motor only, Caro and I were able to boat 3 more quality smallies in the 3 to 4lbs range. It was around 10am when my dad gave me a call to tell me he was on it's way to pick me up. Now I started thinking that I should've called him later but I didn't think I had a chance to win an event with no motor. With my dad waiting for me on shore at 11:30am I put the trolling motor to 100% and put those Demone batteries to the test. On our way back to meet my dad, I had a waypoint marked on the GPS and we just had to give it a try to catch our 5th and last fish. On the first pass, I got a nice "thump" on the drop shot but never managed to set the hook.... I wasn't going to miss it twice! The 2nd pass produced the fish we needed to at least have a shot at a top 5.
We got back to the launch at 1:00PM but we weren't aloud to fish after being towed so we had to wait 2 hours to weigh our fish. Unfortunately, we had a fish die at the weigh-in and lost half a pound for a total weight of 19.30. To my surprise, nobody was able to beat us today and we won the event for a second year in a row with #1 lunker on top of that.
I'd like to thank all my sponsors today but especially Demone batteries who didn't slow down one bit even after 1 hour of 100% power on my Minnkota. I was able to fight the current and make my way back to the dock safely.
