I’m sorry, I don’t have much advice as I don’t troll much but just be glad that you weren’t there last weekend. 40 boats loaded with the best tourney musky anglers in the world were there for the PMTT and they couldn’t come up with 1 fish!!! Crazy.
Congrats to my buddy Chad Mitchell-Peterson and his partner Ross for winning the Top-Gun award. They tore it up this season!
From today’s Pioneer Press:
Dave Orrick: ‘World Championship’ fishing tournament nets zero fish
By Dave Orrick
[email protected]
Posted: 09/26/2012 12:01:00 AM CDT
September 26, 2012 3:20 PM GMTUpdated: 09/26/2012 10:20:18 AM CDT
Did you hear the one about the world championship fishing tournament where no one caught a fish?
It happened last weekend in Green Bay, Wis., where, for the first time in the 14-year history of the Professional Musky Tournament Trail, no muskie was caught.
Over two days. With 40 teams of two expert anglers each. That’s more than 1,100 man-hours of fishing. And nothing.
Not even a strike.
Not even a follow.
“Zilched! Just zilched across the board,” said Ross Korpela of Carleton, Minn., still digesting the skunking. “There were rumors of a pike or two, but nothing from a muskie. It was a humbling to your muskie ego.”
The Ranger Boats World Championship was the final event of the yearlong tournament circuit, so it’s kind of like if no one had even posted a score last weekend in the PGA Tour Championship. If that had happened, Rory McIlroy would have won the FedEx Cup by default.
That’s exactly what happened with Korpela and his partner, Chad Mitchell-Peterson of Inver Grove Heights, who went into the season’s final event leading the 2012 Top Gun Team of the Year standings (FedEx Cup equivalent) by 5 points.
The zilching of everyone meant they were crowned season champions.
“It’s a big deal, and we’re proud because we earned it,” said Mitchell-Peterson, a regional sales director for an insurance company. “Of course, it was unfortunate we couldn’t stick one in the final event.”
He and Korpela, who works for a timber products company, garner free entries into next season’s tournaments and minor celebrity status within the muskie fishing community.
The event was expected to be the crowning event of the season, which has featured record-breaking numbers of muskies, a notoriously finicky fish to fool. Although the muskellunge is known as “the fish of 10,000 casts,” on a recent tournament at Leech Lake, one team was witnessed to have had a strike from a muskie “on every cast” for a stretch, the tournament reported.
In the past few decades, Green Bay has transformed from a place that occasionally holds muskies to a place where some believe the world record lurks.
But over the weekend, a series of cold fronts packing high winds, combined with an industrial dredging project on the Fox River that led to turbid waters, appear to have conspired to make the fishing conditions “dreadful,” in the words of Mitchell-Peterson.
“We fished the cabbage; we hit the sand. We downsized, we upsized, we varied speeds — and everyone was doing the same,” he said. “These were the best of the best muskie fishermen, so they all know how to adapt. I guarantee everyone left everything on the water out there.”
At the end of the first day, when the leader board revealed a 40-way tie (for first place or last?), a chorus of cheers and laughter erupted — relief that everyone was having the same troubles, those there said.
“We were joking about having a dance-off to figure out the winner,” Mitchell-Peterson said.
At the end of the second and final day, tournament organizers, having scrutinized the rules, decided to raffle off the prizes of the World Championship, including the first-prize Ranger boat and second-prize $4,200.
Mitchell-Peterson and Korpela won second place.
Dave Orrick can be reached at 651-228-5512. Follow him at twitter.com/OutdoorsNow.
Word on the street is that an angler in the Midwest Walleye Championships landed a 40 incher and a non-tourney muskie fisherman landed one inside the boundary as well.
It makes me feel a lot better about getting skunked when 80 of the best pros around can go out for 2 days and get the big ol’ skunkaroo.
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