MWT St Croix results - Walleye Tournament HQ - Walleye Tournament HQ

Tournament Report…just thought I’d share a little information about the tourney. My partner and I had never fished the St. Croix before. We tried to apply some of the techniques that we have learned from this website during the past few years. Our prefishing involved using leadcore, jigging and rigging to try and locate active fish. After five days of prefishing we had little to show for our efforts, but we had eliminated a lot of water. Going into Sunday we only had two spots that we had any confidence in. Our first spot we knew was holding smaller fish and the second spot had been holding fewer, but larger fish. Our plan was to start at our first spot and hopefully catch a few legals to start the day. It seems like in many tournaments the pressure is really on to catch that first fish and after that every thing becomes a little easier.
Well my partner got us off to a great start by catching our first two walleyes at 7:20 and 7:22. Both fish were about 15 1/2″. We picked up two more by 8:00 and we had our 6 by 9:00. All 6 fish were between 15 1/2 and 17 inches…certainly not fish that would win the tournament, but it was a great feeling knowing that we had the next 6 hours to try an upgrade. The area we were fishing was the edge of a break that went from 13 to 30 ft. The fish were mainly caught between 20 and 24 feet. We were using three ways with 3 oz. bell sinkers and crawlers.
We then decided to move to our “big fish” spot. We knew that the larger fish had been being caught on jigs and minnows, but we decided to stick with the 3-ways and the crawlers. On our first pass I caught a 27+. We were fairly confident that would put us in the money. We continued to work this area for the rest of the day. At 1:30 my partner stuck another 27+ fish. Both of our big fish came in 18′ of water. At 2:20 we caught our last 17″….for the day we caught 9 legal fish, probably 8 to 10 shorts and I would guess 40 sheepies.
We waited towards the end to weigh our fish…the leaders at the time had almost 18 pounds…our basket weighed 21 lbs….it was a great feeling knowing that we had been lucky enough to actually win a tournament.
One of the great things about fishing tournaments is that you get to fish new bodies of water that you haven’t tried before. I know that I certainly will fish the St. Croix again, it’s a great fishery. Another thing about tournament fishing is that you are “forced” to learn new techniques in order to catch fish. I know that 3-waying isn’t something that I have done a lot in the past, but obviously under the right conditions it can be a very effective way to catch fish.