Another Tough Outing

[pooch]

Another Tough Outing

 

This past weekend, I fished 2 days at the Bay of Quinte for the last stop of the Competitive Sport Fishing League’s eastern series. It is one of my favourite fisheries, but even the Bay could not beat the slump we are in this year.

 

Saturday the winds were forecast to be 5 km/h from the south so we thought the lake would be calm and that was our game plan; chase Lake Ontario smallmouth. We boated for 30 minutes from Trenton to the gap to Lake Ontario and when we turned the corner to the big lake it certainly was not as calm as we had anticipated; we were rudely greeted with five foot rollers. Five footers are certainly not invincible, just big enough that boating slowed down to a crawl at times and made the journey more painful than we expected. Luckily we found our smallies in the same spot as in pre-fish, and we had 12 to 15 decent bass cruising around our boat. The problem was we could only coax three into biting, and of course they were the small ones. We worked hard all day trying to get the bigger smallies to commit, but all they wanted to do was chase our jerk bait to the boat. Knowing these three small fish would not help our classic chances; we did not weigh them in and moved our focus to Sunday.

 

We did not pre-fish the Bay much as we were relying on my spots from previous years. I have been very consistent at catching 15 to 17 lbs of largemouth on the bay, so I thought we could muster a decent bag to salvage the weekend. Not so says the fishing gods. My number one spots produced entertaining, but not helpful one to two pound bass all day. I’m guessing we finished in the middle of the group of 80+ boats on Sunday.

 

Conclusion

Tough weekend and a poor finish to a difficult season for us. Last year we cashed a cheque every weekend and we were competitive, challenging for a top spot each tournament. I have qualified for the Classic every year since I started tournament fishing, but not this year. My tournament friends have all told me about bad years they have had; everyone gets into a slump. Our goal for the year was to win a tournament. That requires taking chances and making big gambles, this year none of our gambles paid off. A friend of mine told me, to win tournaments you also have to accept some terrible defeats; it’s just part of the package.

 

I am now turning my focus to fishing a few Kawartha Lakes Fishing Club and Canadian Bass Anglers Federation club tournaments over the next month. I also plan to fish a few days just for fun; a novel concept in the middle of the bass season.

 

Good luck to all those anglers that qualified for the Bassmania classic in Haliburton on Sept 3-5. I hope to visit at 3 pm each day to report on the weigh-in results.

 

What worked?

Lure – White pointer jerk bait for the smallies on Saturday, and white little dipper swim bait by Reaction Innovations for the largemouth on Sunday

Rods – Shimano Compre Medium / Extra Fast

Reels – Shimano Curado 201E7

Line – 40 lb Power Pro braided fishing line

 

Weather Conditions:

Sunny both days

Winds – Moderate 5 km/h from the south on Saturday, 10km/h on Sunday from the east.

Surface water temperatures 72-74 Fahrenheit on the big lake, 77-80 on the Bay

Air temperatures reached a high of 27 Celsius this weekend

 

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