Congrats cade and justin! - Mississippi River – Bass - Mississippi River – Bass

Thanks. Sorry for the late reply, but this tournament was definitely a big one for us. Justin and I have always been planning on fishing team tournaments once we had a tournament boat and this year we were able to make it happen. The tournament was the Bob’s Bait MSBC open tournament, and it was 2 days, 6 fish limit. Most of our prefishing was done 2 weeks in advance, because the weekend before the tournament was all about breaking in the boat. Needless to say, come tournament time the fish were definitely doing something different. We were at a pretty serious disadvantage because of our lack of prefishing time but we didn’t let that stop us. We chose to target smallies because I feel very comfortable with them this time of year and we felt that we had them figured out best. We started on a wingdam that had produced some 2 to 2-1/2 lbers 2 weeks before and got skunked on the down current side. I was just about to leave, but decided that since we are in a tournament we should be thurough and fish the entire dam. We worked around the tip to the upstream side and it wasn’t long before I got smacked by back to back 3 lbers. This is when we made the adjustment to fishing the front sides of wingdams instead of the downstream sides. For the rest of the tournament, we ended up using 1 other wingdam, and we bounced back and fourth between the two, which were about 4 or 5 miles apart, to catch our limit each day. Day one we had a milk run of spots that we planned to hit, and we hit most of them. We really loaded the boat, and probably caught over 30 keepers. I can’t believe how many 2-1/2 lb fish we threw back. By day two we were able to narrow it down to those two wingdams and we hit them over and over again. This proved to be a good idea because I was able to catch another 3+ lber on our starting spot on day 2 on the second time through that could have made a big difference. The bait of the weekend was a lucky craft pointer 78. We also had a largemouth pattern going on the main channel close to our smallmouth areas. We were catching many 2 to 2-1/2 lb largemouth on the jerkbaits on rock shorelines with wood. Unfortunately we had to weigh 3 of those little buggers. All in all it was a great tournament. Going into the tournament I practically had no idea what we were going to do, let alone that we were going to win. Everything just came together and we had a great 2 days of fishing.

Day one weight- 6 fish: 19.98 lbs, 4.32 lbs BB
Day two weight- 6 fish: 15.68 lbs
total: 35.66 lbs

(2nd place = 35.48 )