Team Extreme Ice Tournament #3

We put a lot of miles on the snowmachines
 the last couple of weeks at
 Brushy Creek Lake, but in teh end it was all worth it.

The third tournament of the Team Extreme Ice Tournament trail took us to Brushy Creek Lake.  Mark Anderson and I made a pact at the beginning of year to fish all four of the Team Extreme events.  This tournament was the one we were most worried about.  We had both spent time on Lake Okoboji, the first event, Mark really knows Big Creek Lake which was the second event, and I have spent countless hours on Rock Creek Lake which is the last stop in a couple weeks.  However, I had never ice fished Brushy Creek Lake, and Mark had only been a couple of times.  Needless to say we had our work cut out for us.
We spent a full day last week on Saturday looking around the lake.  I have fished this lake dozens of time from the boat so I did have knowledge of how the lake is set up and where many of the main structures are in the lake.  After searching much of the day and coming up empty we did end up with a couple good areas for bluegills.  The crappies were still a little bit of a mystery.  After trading notes all week long and studying the map some more we met up the day before the tournament for another look around.  Mark was able to fish on Friday and found good a crappie spot.  That was great news to hear.  We spent another full day on the lake in 30+ mph winds and temperatures in the teens.  It was a test of not only fishing, but a mental and physical test too.  We hit a lot of areas and added to our game plan.
We ended up only fishing two areas on tournament day.  Like most teams in the event, we hit our crappies first and got a limit fairly quickly.  We continued to catch and upgraded our sizes.  We moved shallow on the same location and picked up a couple bluegills to add to our bucket.  The tournament limit is 8 crappies and 8 bluegills, so we had to continue to find and catch some more gills throughout the morning.  We made the run to another area where gills were caught during practice.  We ended up staying there until the end of the event.  We caught gills in the 14-24 foot range.  The best areas seemed to be just off the cover.  Finding these areas were pretty easy with the use of our Vexilar FLX-28's.  I found it key to be off of the standing timber.  Finding areas that showed green tree limbs on the Vexilar were key, and it was where the bluegills were cruising.  Another key feature of the FLX-28 and ProView transducer was the capability of picking of up 3mm Sportsman Direct Tungston Heavy Metal jig near that brush.  Take those features and the ability to zoom into the bottom 6 feet of the water column really gave me a leg up on the gills.  
We never made it to any other area on the lake, we felt that if we continued to upgrade our fish, then we might as well just stay put.  That plan worked well, and once again Mark and I fished great together.  We seemed to be on the same page all day long, and when one guy wasn't catching fish, the other seemed to be and that raised each of our spirits.

We were in the lead for Team of the Year points before this event by 3 points.  In the points standings, each place is worth one point, so every place you slide down, your points slide down too.  We weighed in our 16 fish for 8.71 pounds for second place, and the winners had 8.93 pounds.  This keeps us in first place, and we extended our lead to 6 points.  Just a few days until the final tournament at Rock Creek Lake on March 1st.