Merritt Reservoir Report 6-29-07 – 7-1.07

Over the last weekend my tournament partner Pete and I headed to Merritt Reservoir for the 5th tournament of 6 in the Nebraska Walleye Trail. We had perfect weather and there was certainly lots of walleye to be caught. Merritt is always one of our favorite places to fish because it sits in the middle of the beautiful Nebraska sandhills and borders the McKelvie National Forest.

We made the 5 hour drive Thursday evening so we could get in 2 full days of prefishing before our Sunday tournament. Friday morning we headed out to check some favorite areas in the Snake River arm of the lake. We were prepared to fish several different presentations if we could not find a good trolling bite. With the water temperatures in the mid 70’s we knew the walleyes would be ready to leave their spring haunts on their way to their suspended summer patterns. We started out trolling a mixture of different crankbaits in 15 FOW looking for active fish. We kept switching to different styles of cranks in a variety of colors until we found a couple that produced some bigger fish. We finally found a good bait that was working for us and realized we only had one of them that bsfisherman (Ben Seim) gave me a few weeks ago. Luckily he was going to be at the tournament and we could see if he would trade us for a few more. We ended the day catching close to 30 walleye. Only 2 of them were keepers but both were impressive fish. They were both 22 inches long and fat, weighing in at over 3.5 pounds each. We were fairly happy with our first day of prefishing and still had another day to see if we could find some schools of keeper sized fish.

Saturday turned out to be a little tougher day for us. We continued to troll some new areas for most of the morning and couldn’t come up with a keeper. After lunch we decided to go try dragging some live bait on the edges of weed beds. We caught several more short fish but failed to get a keeper for the day. It was unusual for us to catch so many short walleyes at this lake. I can’t ever remember a trip up there where we would catch so many of them. If you caught a walleye it was generally a keeper. There must be a couple of great year classes in there. I sure can’t wait until they get a little bigger.

On Sunday we were the first team to leave at take off and couldn’t wait to get down the lake to get in a couple of trolling runs before the second flight of boats were released. We headed to the area where we caught our first keeper on Friday and it wasn’t long until we had a extreamly fat 21 3/4 incher in the boat on our first pass. We continued to work the point and after a couple of hours picked up another fat 21 incher followed by a 18 1/2 on our next pass. This is our shortest tournament of the year and we had to be back to the weigh in at 2:00. We struggled to come up with another keeper in the 14 to 16 FOW were we caught the others. While turning around at the end of a pass we marked some fish on our finder in a little deeper water. So we let out another color of lead and tried the deeper water. With about 15 minutes left to fish we hooked up with what we believed to be a fish that could have won us the tournament. We never got to see it but it sure had us excited. It finally came unhooked about half way back to the boat. I’m almost glad we didn’t get to see it. That just makes losing it even tougher during a tournament. We ended the tournament weighing 3 fat fish that totaled 10.93 lbs. and finished 13th place. We missed getting a check by 1 place. The winners were the only team to bring a 5 fish basket to the scales. There winning weight was just under 18 lbs. for the day. Pictured here are our 2 biggest fish on tournament day.