This year was the 3rd edition of the Berkley B1. Having fished the previous two events I can say that Mike, Ben and their team were able to make it even a better this year.
I was fishing with Marc Barretti aka "Bar" again this year for this event. We obviously didn't put the practice we had originally planned due to my lower unit misfortune from my last tournament but we were still able to put in 2 full weekends confirming stuff and looking for new things as well. I felt we found something interesting in practice but needed more time to have it completely dialed in so we spent most of our time on areas that we knew well.
On day one we were hoping for a shallow smallie bite in the morning and never got it going. To our surprise we caught a 2.5lbs largemouth there instead.... It took about an hour before we decided to go deeper to see if we could get more bites. After few adjustments mostly due to the NE winds I finally caught a fish on the drop shot while Bar was dragging a tube. It was a nice keeper that got us pumped and from that point the fish started to come in the boat... In less then an hour we were able to get a decent limit. We only had 1 small fish to change and plenty of time to find it. We spent the rest of the day "runnin and gunnin" on our favorite and most constant areas and brought back a decent limit of 18.73lbs good for 14th place and a place in the top 25 drive-by weigh-in the next day.
We started day 2 knowing we were out of the race to win it but we still had a chance at a top 10 position. The shallow bite had to produce and it simply didn't..... The area I was fishing was very crowded this year and practice had not been very good on the flats either so we decided to do what we do best with tubes and drop shot. The results would've been similar to day one had we not dropped any fish but hey... it happens! We finished the day with 16.81lbs and dropped down to 19th place.
Unfortunately, we weren't able to beat last year's performance but we'll take the top 20 and try to do better next year.
