Team Extreme Ice Tournament #4...the finale

My ice fishing tournament season came to a close yesterday in the finale of the Team Extreme Iowa Division.  The event was located at Rock Creek Lake, a lake that I have frequently visited in the past decade.  Prior to this event my partner Mark Anderson and I were in first place for Team of the Year by 6 points.  This meet that we the team behind us had to beat us by six places to take the lead, as each place in the tournament is worth one point.  Needless to say we were glad that the last event was on a lake that we were both familiar with.
As fate would hate it though, this particular year I had only visited the lake two times before the event, something I was not real happy about it, but is has been a busy winter.  We went into the event fishing on a lot of past history and knowledge of the lake.
We started the day fishing in the deeper basin in about 12 feet of water and the action was slow.  We picked up a few gills and crappies but weren't satisfied.  We  over on to another location in the basin a little deeper to search for those suspended crappies and bottom hugging gills.  Using our Vexilar FLX-28s we quickly moved from hole to hole looking for active fish.  If we saw signals on the bottom, a quick flip to zoom mode on Vexilar and we were dialed in to those bottom huggers.  Using plastic baits all day long made for quick catches as schools of gills and crappies came through the basin.  Some were hungry and some schools we really had to work for. We hit several others areas that day under 10 foot of water and caught fish there too.  It seemed like fish were biting all over the lake, and we upgraded our catch until the last few minutes of the day.  On the day we probably caught 60-70 crappies and gills and had out best 8 of each to weigh in.  We ended up with 5.90 pounds which I thought would be pretty good.  However, several other teams found some bigger crappies and we ended up in 5th place out of 17 teams.  A respectable finish but lower than we had hoped.  As we waited for all the teams to weigh in we could only wait to see if we had caught enough to capture the Team of the Year crown.