Brian and I covered a lot of water in Pool 10 on Friday, however we didn't like what we saw, only a few small keeper largemouth bass. We decided that we should focus in on some areas that treated me well last weekend up a pool in #9. Our practice showed us that there were definitely the right kinds of bass biting in that pool amid the areas we tried. We decided to test ourselves and go to Pool 9 to fish the tournament on the following day. This however, means that you must go through a lock two times during the competition day...which is always a risk.
The actual fishing was slow on Sunday, and we knew that it would be. Most teams that were talking after Saturday only commented on how slow the bite was or even non-existent. We knew that if we could get 6 keepers (the tournament limit) that we would be just fine. We started the day off on the main channel (after about a 1.5 hour fog delay) and caught one on a Hot Rod Baits Tube. We then followed our plan to fish some backwater areas of Pool 9. It was a repeat, Texas-rigged tubes were working, however this time two keeper largemouth came into the boat. It was really nice to be able to put the Minn Kota Talons down and work over every piece of wood and weed bed. Our time was running out, as three barges were headed south to go through the same lock that we had to get through and make it back for the 2pm weigh-in. We had 3 keepers, but that wasn't going to do much for us, so we gambled and made our way to another backwater area that was full of weeds and hopefully bass. I quickly hooked up on our largest bass for the day on an Optimum Baits Furbit Frog. Brian added keeper #5 flipping a River Minnow tube from Hot Rod Baits. We had five keepers and we knew we had to get going to make the lock before the last barge that afternoon.
We made our south towards the lock and went by the barge that we had to beat, no problems, we were feeling pretty good. However, I made the dreaded call that no bass angler really wants to make. As we got close to lock, a barge was there and making its way through. It was about 12:30 and lack master said that it would be 1.5 hours until the lock would be free for us to go through. This was the worse news we could have heard. We sat discussed trying to make sense of it, but we couldn't. We did everything we could, practiced hard, had the areas to catch some quality fish, and now it was all for nothing. We probably wouldn't even get through the lock until after 2pm, ruining our tough, but great day of fishing.
Brian and I sat in the boat for well over an hour, and normally this would just give us an opportunity to chit-chat about things...but very little was said. I called a friend int eh tournament to have him set up the weigh-in materials and told him I didn't know when we might be back. We put all our Quantum rod and reels away and just sat, disappointment doesn't really describe the feeling we had, we knew it was a risk, and we knew we had to go that one last area to try and upgrade our total, so fate just wasn't lined up for us...UNTIL at about 1:44 the lock and
dam horn sounded.
We looked at each other knowing that the horn was signaling the barge to go south. We thought we had a slight chance...and then the doors opened for us! We, along with another pontoon (who most likely though we were crazy as we were clapping the process on) quickly made our way into the lock and the doors closed behind us, I watched the seconds tick by on my GPS, both our hearts pounding. The doors opened at 1:54pm and we made it back to the weigh-in with 2 minutes to spare, it was quite a ride on Mississippi River that day!!! Oh, and our 5 keeper bass earned us a 3rd place finish with a nice payday! For the second weekend in a row the river was very tough, but in the end very kind to me and my partners.
No comments:
Post a Comment