Nice job cade - Mississippi River – Bass - Mississippi River – Bass

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cann’t wait to read the story Cade! Great job

Thanks guys. It was a great day of fishing for sure. I was lucky that the state tournament happened to be just one week after the bfl, so I was able to get some time on the water before hand. I drove down early Friday morning, the 19th of June with my boat in tow headed for Winneconne. The plan was to pre-fish the day close to the launch site because I knew that a lot of tournaments had been going on and release fish would not be far from the ramp. Sure enough, I caught 6 keepers including a nice 18 incher putting my best 5 over 11 lbs. My friend Tony also had 3 keepers. I knew after that outting exactly what I was going to do for the state tournament. The next week came and we got some prefishing in again on Winneconne and Butte De Morts. We found some solid fish just south of my primary area on winneconne and I decided to start on that new area. With 30 mph. winds on Sunday, the first area was a bust. I had 0 fish in the boat by about 7:00 AM (tournament launched at 5:00) and I moved to the area I found the week before. I got on the seawalls and started flipping a sweet beaver (black w/ blue fleck) and put a limit in the boat by about 7:30. I then caught a 2-1/2+ lb smallmouth that really helped. about 10:00 AM I had around 7 keepers in the boat and over 10 lbs on my best 5. The wind was really whipping and we knew the run back across Butte De Morts (back to oshkosh) was going to be brutal, so we decided to head back in. We fished around close to the ramp and I caught 4 more keepers that didn’t help in a quick fashion using a swim jig and a sweet beaver on a rip rap/weed bank. with about 1 hour to go, we headed to one last little side channel about 3 blocks away from the launch. I saw a corner in a boat slip that had some duckweed build up that I really liked. My boater urged me to keep moving but my river froggin’ instinct told me to hit every inch of that corner. It wasn’t 30 seconds after he told me to move on when the most subtle suck occured on my frog and I buried the hooks into a solid fish. There were a couple of stumps between the corner and the boat, and the fish managed to find a way to hang on both of them, before I was able to free the fish with careful rod manuvering and get it to the net. this fish was by far the biggest game changer of the day, and took my limit to a whole new level. It proved to be extremely important in my win, as the fish jumped my limit about a pound and I only won by 3 or 4 ounces. my final weight was 11.12 lbs and my friend Jared came in 2nd with 10.90 lbs followed by my friend Tony, who i prefished with, with 9.5 lbs. The River Road Junior Bassmasters brought home all the hardware in the 15-18 age group!

Here are a couple of pics from pre fishing, sorry I don’t have any pictures from the state tournament fish..