Search the Community

I have a trailer up in Ennismore on Buckhorn. This past weekend was the Theona Park fishing tournament - 16 teams. I've entered the last 3 years rotating partners between my dad, my brother and this year a family friend. This season has been a weird one. Catching in unconventional ways compared to the norm. The heavenly spots that you visualize catches on aren't producing. There's definitely been quantity this year but nothing of substantial size. A normal day is anywhere from 4-8 1lb largies. Despite all of this I had a good gut feeling about the tournament. We had a smallie spot in mind that we knew we needed to hit first but it was going to be tough knowing others knew about it as well. Sure enough someone had beat us to it and within 45 min landed himself what had seemed to be a 5lb. smallie. This sent us for a whirl and really crushed any excitement we had started out with. We started working a small patch of reeds around that spot and an hour and a bit in landed our first bass (3lb) on a white swimmer. We worked up a shoreline not far from that spot and while my friend was working the back of the boat out into more open water I was hitting the shoreline with a wacky, something that hadn't been working for me all season until then. I landed two 4+ lb. largemouth on that worm and just like that we felt like we may be in the running. The last few hours were near dead and the last 2 bass caught were just to fill the limit and add to our overall weight but I was really hoping on that one bass to maybe even take biggest fish. It was close. At weigh in we had a total of 13.6 landing us 3rd place! Largest fish went to that guys smallie at 4.85. My largest fish was just under him at 4.6. All in all it was a great day and the first time I've ever placed in a tournament or caught that quality of fish in a day. It really made up for a not so exciting season on our lake thus far.