2007 Cabela’s NTC

I just returned ealier this week from Green Bay, Wisconsin. My tournament partner Pete Meister and myself were there for the 2007 Cabela’s National Team Championship. This was our first trip to the Greal Lakes and was a great expierence. We learned a lot about big water while we were there. The biggest thing we learned was how the wind can make for a very interesting day on big water.

Our prefishing for the tournament started on Memorial weekend. I was able to make an extra trip up there to do a little prefishing with fellow IDA member Adam Adler. A good friend of mine, Andy Huff, who also qualified for the NTC, made the trip with me. Adam was a big help to us, as he really helped us shorten the learning curve on the Bay. He showed us the in’s and out’s of runing spinners on the open water. We were able to perfect pulling spinners without weights in shallow water and also the use of keel weights in a liitle bit deeper water. We learned how the fish would soon be in a transition stage of moving to a little deeper water. Our first day on the water with Adam produced several nice fish including 6 walleyes over 25 inches.

Pete and I returned a week and a half later to find our spots that could help us win the 2007 NTC Tournament. After an all night drive from Nebraska to get to Green Bay, Pete and I finally hit the water around 4:00 in the afternoon. We fished some shallow water just outside the Little Suamico River. I gave Pete a quick run through on how to run spinners without wieghts and it didn’t take long for him to catch on. We ended the evening catching over 25 walleyes. All were over 19 inches but none were big enough to consider "tournament winners".

Over the next several days Pete and I caught hundreds of walleyes. We fished the Pensaukee Shoal area, Geanos Reef, Oconto Shoal, Vincent Point, the Fox River and many others. We found a few of those areas to be holding some bigger fish that could be helpful to us come tournament time.

On Day One of the tournament we were very excited to get things rolling. We arrived at the boat check to find out that Cabela’s had decided to hold us all to an inner bay foul weather boundry. We were a little bummed out because we knew fishing the inner bay would mean smaller weights for everyone. Well, it didn’t take long for Cabela’s to come back on the radio and announce that they had changed their minds and opened up the boundries. Everyone was very excited and we knew we would have to travel over 30 miles in some rough water to make it to the bigger fish. At take off we knew things were going to be rough when only a 1/2 mile out side the bay we witnessed several boats getting airborne while jumping waves and passed a motor cowling floating in the water. We finally arrived at Pensaukee Shoal after battling the waves for an hour. Conditions were so bad that Pete’s scuba diving watch was full of water. These were the worst conditions I had ever been in but we were on a mission to win the tournament. The area of Pensauke Shoal that we were fishing was a very steep break that broke from 2′ to 24′. It was nearly impossible to keep the boat on the break because of the wind direction. This is where we made our biggest mistake of the week. We spent entirely too much time trying to fish this area under these type of conditions. We shouldn’t have been so reluctant to take another boat ride to a more fishable spot. This was by far the number one thing we learned about fishing tournaments on big water. We had to finish off the day in spot we knew we could get some quick fish to take to the scales. With less than 2 hours to fish we put 3 19 inch fish in the livewell in 15 minutes and then our spot went dead on us. We hit one more area on the way in to try to get our 4th and 5th fish but things just didn’t work out. We had to head to the scales with a disappointing 7.77 lb basket.

Day 2 brought much better conditions and allowed us to have better boat control. We fished an area different from the day before and had a lot better luck. We were fishing the mud flats just off Geanos Reef. We made up our minds that we wouldn’t put anything in the livewell that was under 21 inches and were going to hold the 6th spot in the well for something over 25. We had no problems getting our first 5 fish over 21 inches but trying to hook up with a bigger fish was tough. We witnessed a handful of nice fish caught in the area, including our friends Bill Siebert and Leland Bailey. They added a 28 incher to the 31 they had caught earlier in the day. We ended the day going to the scales with 5 fish over 21 inches that weighed 17.28 lbs. A big improvement over day one and good enough to top 100 other teams with our two day total of 25.05 lbs.

A big congratulations to our friends Bill and Leland from Kearney, Nebraska (pictured above with their trophies) for their 7th place finish in the tournament. They were the highest finishing out of state team and earned themselves All American Honors!