Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Number 13 : Luck or bad luck?

August 13th, 2011

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.


St-Francis practice time!

August 6-7, 2011

With Econobass next weekend and the Berkley B1 in september it's obvious I will be spending a lot of time on lake St-Francis for the next 2 months. It's no secret that I love this body of water but I would like to find some BIG fish this year in order to defend my Econobass title from last year and do another top 10 at the Berkley B1 2011.

I was able to put in 2 days of practice with Caro and my brother Raph but it wasn't a big success to say the least. The objective was to find new big fish area and validate other spots from previous years. My stuff from previous years is still very good but finding new big fish is quite the challenge. I find the weed has grown differently in most places and some of my prime areas don't produce quite as good as last year but fortunatly the deeper water smallies are still locked down on my GPS and biting well!

I tried looking for largies has a "Plan B" and found a nice deep weedline that produced some decent size. I don't think I will be needing them but I can't wait to go back to check it out before the B1.

Overall, practice wasn't very good in the sense that I couldn't find any new stuff that I am confident to fish at the tournament next weekend but there is a lot of time left to figure it out before the B1.




Monday, August 29, 2011

Econobass - Lac des Deux-Montagnes

July 30th, 2011

I've had such a hard time on this lake in the summer that Caro and I had a simple objective : Catch 5 fish. I don't know if it's because we put the bar so low but we were able to get 5 smallmouth in 20 mins on our first spot. We were pretty happy about that because we knew that a lot of teams were going to struggle to get 5 fish in the livewell today. We stayed there awhile hoping to get one of the decent size smallies when had seen in practice but couldn't get anything much bigger then 2.5lbs. It's too bad because the fish were feeding heavily on minnows and were jumping on our Dumz sticks on almost every cast.

We then went upstream to fish another area for both largies and smallies and only got short bites... From there it was spot hopping until we decided to hit a main bay for largies and lost some more time there... I believe I was in the right area but probably too late when I saw how many boats had fished the area already. We decided to hit our main area once more before the end of the day and caught some other fish but could never upgrade any of our fish.

We finished our day with a mediocre weight of 8.95lbs good enough for 18th place. I can't say we are satisfied but it's an improvement over last years results nonetheless.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Vacation fishing!

July 18 - 22nd, 2011

It's no surprise that Caro and I spent most of our vacation fishing again this year. We spent 2 hard days of practice looking for smallmouth and largemouth on lake 2 Mountains. I know this lake has good smallies but it's also the most dangerous lake we have around here and I don't like risking losing my lower unit every time I'm out there looking for them. I was able to fish some new water but again the conditions made it difficult and the reward was somewhat interesting but too risky for the tournament, unless we get very little wind. I really wanted to concentrate on finding new smallies and put very little time on the largies.... Most of the largies are all in the same area and a lot of boats are fighting for the same spots. Practice ended up not being so good but we did find a few interesting stuff on the last day just before getting off the water that was promising for the tournament.

We were also on lake St-Louis, St-Francis and other local lakes for some fun fishing.

Here are a few pics from our vacation: