Team Extreme February Ice Tournament

The Team Extreme Ice Fishing Tournament trail came to Rock Creek Lake last Sunday.  Partner Mark Anderson and I had decided to fish this a long time ago and the time was finally here.  Both Mark and I spent quite a bit of time preparing for this event, either studying maps, GPS coordinates, or time on the ice.  We both were pretty anxious to get this tournament going and see where we placed against some of the best ice anglers in the state.
We put together a game plan, knowing that some of our fishing areas would probably be a secret and not fished by competitors.  Our plan worked great.  We started fishing in deeper water near some brush.  The limit for each team for this event was 8 bluegills and 8 crappies.  We had this filled in about 25 minutes.  The size of those fish weren't huge, but it is always a relief to get the limit covered.  We kept fishing hard all day long, which was made easy, as the Vexilar FLX-28's were lit up all day long.  We hopped around the lake and hit 6 different areas.  Some we hit a second time.  We were catching fish at each area, but we honed in on a couple main areas that were in deeper water.
We had discussed before the event that the bluegills are more scarce in the lake and would be the key to victory.  This was very evident come weigh-in time.  Almost every team had the double limit of panfish, which surprised me a little bit.  However, team after team weighed in and the gills were definitely on the small side.  We had some nice 8+ inch gills which outweighed our crappies.  We ended up with 6.93# for our 16 panfish, we ended up 2nd place.  First place had 7.14# which was anchored by a 1.30# crappie.  A huge crappie for this lake, and congrats to them for catching it.  It was a great tournament, and our plan came together wonderfully, and another great placing for Mark and I.