I was fishing a "Ripple" from http://fishin-canada.net today with Marc-André on Francis. When we signed up for this tourney we had no idea so many people would show up. Not only were there a lot of people but all the best anglers in QC were there. Everyone was talking about a potential 30lbs bag of smallies!! I kept telling myself it was impossible... How can anyone have an average of 6lbs per fish?!? Forget average... I have never even caught one in the 6lbs range. I know Francis holds a good amount of 6lbs+ fish but to get 5 in a day seemed nearly impossible to me.
Knowing the competition was as tough as it gets we still went and gave everything we had. We fished an area where I was confident we could get at least 16-18lbs and I was hoping for a big one to help us get closer to 20lbs. Even with 20lbs I knew we had no chance with all the bags that had been brought to the scale recently on this lake.
We started off shallow hoping to find a few active fish but we were quickly disappointed.... We didn't even get a fish to follow our baits. We tried for a little less then an hour and decided to try another pattern in deeper water. We started catching a lot of fish and had to cull a few of them when we were done with this drift. We mostly drifted in different areas where I had caught some good fish in the past and that's basically how we caught all our fish. At the end of the day I knew we were missing one kicker fish to have a decent bag so I headed out to an area where I usually can catch a 4+ but we got there too late. We only had about 20 mins to fish and wasn't enough...
I though we had about 16lbs but I always guess less that way i'm not disappointed when I see the final weight. I was happy to hear that we had over 17lbs even if I knew it wasn't good enough for a top 10. Full results can been seen here
Just like the week before at the classic, guys were showing up at the scale with ridiculous weights... A few over 25lbs and finally... the magic number came up : 30.35lbs!! Nigel Toughey and Charles Sim not only broke the 30lbs barrier but they also broke the Canadian Record for 5 bass without a single largemouth. They're biggest fish tipped the scale at 7.15lbs.... It was just awesome to be able to see all those huge smallmouths in person.
Francis is officially the best smallmouth fishery in my book and I live only 30mins away!
