Its a celebration!

After collecting my $3,300 check, Luke, Kyle and I went down to the restuarant to get dinner. The only other people in the place was Brandon Palanuik and Ish Monroe. Fisherman know who these guys are but for those that dont,  they are both Elite Series superstars.

In celebration, I decided to order a 3lb hamburger for dinner, Ish and Brandon were in awe, we all decided that an entire homeless family could eat for a week on this hamburger. Brandon snapped a pic and posted it on his facebook page.  Follow him at https://www.facebook.com/brandonpalaniuk,  awesome angler and a good dude...

If I had eaten this thing in 1 hour, it would have been free. As it turns out, I didnt even get to the bun...

 

 

Splash!

Well, I pulled into the driveway last night at midnight after 10 days in Kissimmee Florida for the 1st Bassmaster event of the season and for the last 200 miles, it snowed and it snowed hard. Towing a boat on icy roads is not my idea of a good time. Although,  the boat seems to keep the truck stable, getting sideways gets corrected rather quickly when you have 2500 lbs dragging behind you. It was a strong start to the season considering Florida has always been an unholy place to go fishing for me.

Where do I start?  First off, I didnt really have time to blog and internet service wasnt accessible to my computer and as you will find out, my phone wasnt really an option either.

How bout with the mishaps... On monday, the monday before the tournament started, I was talking to the wife on the phone while simultaneously fishing an extremely thick matt of vegetation. Phone wedged between ear and shoulder, 8ft flipping rod in hand with a 2 oz tungsten weight and a warrior baits quiver bug at the end, between them, 65lb rope...  When you get a bite with that set up,  you can feel the shockwaves through your whole body and wouldnt you know it,  I got bit at that very moment.  The phone becomes "unwedged" and in slow motion, dropped straight into the lake... OMG!  what the hell am I going to do now? A cell phone has become an extension of every day life,  you might as well have removed one of my testicles at that point because I felt incomplete.  The water was only about 4 foot deep and my boat hadnt moved an inch so I decided it would be a fantastic idea to strip down to my underwear and retrieve the iphone 4 from Lake Kissimmee.  Now, that doesnt sound all that bad right?  Except this lake is infested with gators, and some big ones too. Just a few days earlier, there was a discussion back at the hotel room between myself and my two roomates (Luke Gritter, Kyle Kempkers) about how many gators are actually in the lake. I suggested that there was probably a gator under every single vegetation matt and at the moment I was stripping down, it hadnt occured to me that a dead iphone wasnt worth getting my leg or my crank torn off. None the less, I proceeded and got the phone back. I let it sit out all day long and when the day was over, I stuck the thing in my heater vent and cranked it on the way to the Apple store at the mall. What a disappointment!  I thought those guys were "geniuses", they cant fix a little water damage?  What good are they? Had to buy a new phone, lost all my contacts, essentially flushed 150 bones into the lake.

As for the fishing...
I had a pretty solid practice and by the time the final few days of practice were winding down, I was feeling more and more capable of throwing down a 20 to 25lb sack of fish on the scales. I had 3 really workable patterns and they all seemed to be very consistent.

The matt fishing - for those that dont know, matts basically are small islands of vegetation just growing in random areas of the lake. There is usually about 2-4 feet of water under them and some of them are loaded with fish. The challenge becomes 3 fold. Finding the productive matts, getting through those matts and getting down to the fish, and lastly, extracting those fish out from underneath those matts. Big gear is a must, a huge flipping rod, heavy line, huge sinkers and big hooks. Most of the time, when you hook one of those fish, you wont get it out without actually going to the fish and manually removing them with your hands.  You have to pull them to the top, pin them there and motor into the matt and physically remove them, otherwise, they arent coming out.  Anyways, this was the best way to get big fish but it was also the least reliable and provided the least amount of bites for me but almost always, it was a 4lber or more.

Skinny dipper -  No, im not talking about me and phone retrieval. This is a bait that has been pretty hot in florida for a few years. Its essentially a swim bait.  It seems like a common fluke has been over used down there and the dipper has pretty much taken its place as a staple in florida lakes. It was very easy to catch 2lbrs all day long but getting quality size was few and far between, every once in awhile you would get a 3 or a 3.5 but the big ones didnt seem to want anything to do with this.  Its also a bite that required fairly open and shallow water. So if the weather changed, which it did, this deal would be useless, which it turned out to be.

Swimming a jig - this was an extreme back up plan that i was only going to use if the others were not working or panic was to ensue. Why?  because I felt the quality was a huge risk. I couldnt see getting enough good fish for this to be a good to pattern but if i happened to get a few big bites flipping the matts, I could always use this to fill out a limit.  I also felt that if a major cold front came through, which almost always happens to me, this bit would remain regardless of the weather because I had found deeper water and deeper water fish are less effected by cold fronts.

 

Game day! - We had temps in the mid 80s the entire week leading up to the tournament and wouldnt you know, the night before a front went through which lead to a 1st tournament day high of 68 degrees. I flipped matts until 1 oclock before bailing on it. I had only had 2 bites, one 4lber and another smaller fish that came un-buttoned in the matt.  I immidiately went to the swim jig bite that I had only wanted to use as a backup plan and Im glad I did it when I did. Within 30 minutes I had added a 5lber and another 4lber to the sack and by the time it was time to head back to the launch I had a filled out a limit that ended up weighing 15lbs! Horray for me!

Day 2 was even worse,  we woke up to temps in the 30s and I dont know if you know this but a 45 minute boat ride at 72mph in 30 degree weather is pretty tough.  This time I didnt wait until 1 oclock to hit the swim jig, I bailed at 10 and by 1 I had a solid bag of about 10lbs. The problem was that I had a major dink in the box. It was barely 12 inches, prob only weighed about 3/4 pound and it was killing my weight. I spent 2 hours trying to cull that fish but just couldnt do it. I knew I needed 12 or 13lbs to make the cut so that dink had to go and I just couldnt make it happen.  When I weighed in, I was in 7th place but half the field hadnt weighed in yet and I quickly fell out of the cut mark which is top 12.

18th?  I'll take it. Florida has whooped my ass for a few years now and it felt good to make a run at the title. On to the next one!

IM BACK!!!!!!!

Holy shit I needed a break...   Relentless ass whoopins this year took a toll but after 1000s of requests (really, it was only 1 or 2 requests but whos counting) Im back bitches!  My third and final season fishing the opens (unless its wildly successfull) and it starts next week as I will be heading to Florida for another crack at fishing stardom and riches beyond comprehension in the first southern open on Lake Toho in Kissimmee Florida...

I have some more awesome stories to share about the end of my summer, some good, some bad, and some in between...   Happy to be back and hope everyone starts reading again!!!

Indian Lake....

I pretty much choked my season away yesterday and it was more of the same. Its June and I already cant wait for this season to be over and move on to next year. There absolutely has to be something physically wrong with the way Im setting the hook on fish because I have no explanation for why I am having so much trouble landing fish. Its an epidemic as far as Im concerned, a pandemic, its been a nightmare, a long viscious nightmare of headshake/jump then lure flying out of the water. Ive cost myself thousands of dollars, numerous quality finishes and most importantly, my dignity.  Its fishing, its not the end of the world but it feels like it.

So let me tell you about Indian Lake.   First off,  its 120 miles to the lake from my house so I had to get up at 2:30am which is zero fun, especially if you go to bed at a normal time like normal people do.  I get up and start driving. A note about driving at 3am, anyone on the road at 3am is either drunk or getting drunk or going fishing so you got to be on your A-game because EVERY car is a potential head on collision. Luckily I didnt have any run-ins with DUIers but the craziness wasnt completely missing from the morning. A mile from I-70 I see, what appears to be a child knealing on both knees in the side of the road. WTF?  I am not ashamed to admit that Ive been known to "see" things that didnt exist and after a double take I usually am left wondering,  why did I think I saw that?  This time, I drove by it so quickly there wasnt a chance for a double take.  I get to I-70 and I tell myself "what if that was a kid, I have to turn around because that shit aint safe".  So I turn around, start to get close and see what I had hoped was nothing more then my imagination, a person knealing on both knees facing a guardrail on the side of RT 13.  I do another illegal u-turn, while towing a 21 foot bass boat and I pull of the side of the road and I yell over to the opposite side "HEY!, What are you doing? Are you ok?.  This young girl pops up, sobbing, says she doesnt know where she is, where her car is and she doesnt know what to do. I ask her how old she is and if she is hurt, she says she is 22 years old and that she wasnt hurt. I then ask her one more obvious question, "are you drunk?"  I already knew the answer but I get a definitive "yes" to the question. What the hell do I do now? I tell her to get in my truck and that I will take here up to the gas station so she can get help. We stop at the station and the manager called the cops. No clue the outcome though for all I know shes in jail. She looked alot like this....





Thats how my day started and it went down hill from there. It took a little over 10lbs to win, I lost several keeper fish and one tank that I have no good estimate of and I ended the day with around 6lbs on only 4 keepers.  Im so sick of the excuses, I have been on winning fish over and over again and I havent gotten it done.  For awhile I thought it was just a bad streak but clearly there is a technical flaw in something Im doing and I have no idea what it is. I need to figure something out or its just going to keep happening.

Thanks for the support even though Ive sucked terribly this year. To the reader that asked the question on the last post,  dont pay any attention to some of these people, its the interwebs, lot of crazies out there...

Later
S.T.P.

Practice? We talkin about practice?

So, Indian Lake is up next, sunday is the day. I need a solid tournament (top 10) to stay in contention for a state team spot in the Ohio Bass Federation. I currently sit in 10th place, 7 points out of the last spot. I have been extremely busy with other stuff lately and beleive it or not, my only day I could make the 120 mile, one way trip to Indian Lake was last friday. It was worth it for the fishing but Ive convinced myself that the stuff that I did last week will be of little help this sunday.  The weather is going to be completely different so there is no way I can expect to have another day like I did friday but Im hoping the fish are in the same areas so my adjustments will have to be only technique related, not necessarily different water.

Im praying its not a re-deux of last year. I had a great practice leading up to a tournament on Indian Lake last year and ended up struggling majorly in the tournament.  This past friday I caught an insane sack of bass that was anchored by a spawned out female that weighed between 5 and 6lbs.  A true Ohio tank. If she would have been pre-spawn or even had regained some mid-summer weight, I think she could have been 7+, add that donkey to the multiple 3lbers I caught, I would have been culling 2.5lbers. Conservative estimate had me at 15lbs, realistic estimate 17lbs and  a possible but doubt it bag of 18lbs.


So at the risk of taking a wicked beating,  I feel pretty good about sunday.  I guess we will see how it goes.

Go Celtics!  Game 6 tonight!

Federation Nation Rocky Fork...

Great news,   no lost giants!  Bad news, no hooked giants!  I actually was pretty happy with my performance. I caught a shit load of bass, mostly keepers too but never did get into a donkey. The final results havent been posted so Im not sure where I finished but Im thinking it was somewhere around 18th or 19th out of around 45 guys. I caught a solid limit and I caught fish all day long,  I just didnt get a big bite. I practiced the day before the tournament and the lake had cleared up immensely from a few weeks before, it had also dropped down to a normal level (it was about 3 feet high just a few weeks earlier). The fish had all backed off the bank and guys were catching them near the drops. I on the other hand didnt have that bite going, so I stayed shallow, sort of. Alot of the lake had some thick grass building up around it, during practice I had several blow-ups on a frog and several more blow-ups on a popper just on the edges of the grass.  This is what I roled with. I figured since the "popper" fish were more abundant and easier to land, I would do that for most of the day, or at least until I had a solid limit, then I would shift to frog fishing. Frog fishing is awesome and the fish you drag out of the slop are usually pretty quality fish but the flip side is either A- not landing those fish, or B - not getting a hook into those fish. After getting a limit of about 7lbs, I shifted to the frog bite and had 5 blow-ups in about the last 2 hours of the tournament. Not a single one of them got the frog in their mouth so my bag stayed at that 7ish lbs mark.  I cant really complain, of all the lakes on the schedule, this is the tournament I feared the most. I shouldnt drop that much in the points and I should still be in contention for a state team slot. Next up is Indian Lake, a thorn in my side for years but at a minimum, I know the lake and what it takes to win there. I reckon we will see.

For those who might wonder or might want to know what type of popper I was throwing, and trust me it matters, it was a Lobina Lures Rico. I have absolutely zero connection with them but they make the best freakin poppers ever made. Straight up nasty, at Rockyfork, I probably caught 15 keepers throughout the day, lost a handful more while at the same time, my co-anlger, with a generic popper didnt get a single blow up. Rig up a 6'6'' medium action spinning rod and reel with 10lb braid, you can cast it a mile, work it the way it was meant to be worked, and hold on.....

Old Times....

Its been awhile since I posted, laziness the biggest factor for that, sue me. The Warrior Baits tournament did not go as planned although my lil' bro and I was on some really solid fish. The story of my season so far, lost fish killed the opportunity to throw down a big bag of fish on the scale. It wasnt meant to be. My brother, once again put a nice fish in the box, just like he did at Mosquito Lake last summer. We had a fun time, I always have a blast when I get to fish with my family, whether its my dad or one of my brothers or both. We got to talking out on the boat about some of the crazy times we had as kids while fishing and I thought it might be remotely interesting to share a few stories from my childhood.

Im not going to go all in depth on some of these stories, for all I know, these stories might only be funny to me, so I am sorry in advanced if you feel like you "had to be there". Im also probably going to make this a 2 or 3 part deal as I recall new stories.

 The Bullet - There was a pond near one of the handful of houses my dad lived in while we were growing up. For whatever reason, we were only alowed to fish that pond for one summer. I think maybe someone bought the land or something, hell, maybe the landowners just didnt want some douchey kids raping their pond, cant really recall. Anyway, my step-brother and I (Heath) was fishing for whatever was biting. I was usually throwing some variety of plastic worm when I was that age. Heath was a little less evolved and was throwing some sort of rig that required a 1oz bell sinker. As you know, most anything with a 1oz bell sinker will get away from you in a hurry if youre not careful.  Well thats what happened to Heath, he heaved that rig out and it went about 30 yards up and into a tree. I have no idea what kind of line he was using but it was probably the most generic, heaviest mono you can imagine. Im guessing 25lb or more Eagle Claw economy spool. This snag is in there good, so Heath starts tugging and tugging and tugging. He is really leaning on this thing. It looked like a giant banjo string. When it finally let go, it sounded like a major league fastball. Im watching this whole deal unfold, I didnt know what was going to happen but I was pretty sure something was gonna go down. So the line breaks, but it breaks between the hook and the sinker and that sinker was making a B-line towards Heath at a speed that could only be measured with a high speed camera from Mythbusters. Can you imagine the sound it made when it hit him? You would be disapointed if you actually heard it because it wasnt as exciting as you would think but it still makes me laugh when I replay that sound. It hit him right in the bare chest and sounded something like movie punch. Left a welt on him that looked like a paintball wound and is burned into my memory as to what happens when you pull a little to hard on a snag in a tree.

The Lantern -  We spent alot of time catfishing as kids. I couldnt get enough of it. We always went at night, all summer long, seemed like every night of the week. My dad had a vintage Coleman lantern that we used for, of all things, lighting. It was old school, from the early 70s, but it worked awesome. I think he still has that old lantern somewhere. Anyway, one night, we were doing our usual thing, this time at Lake Alma in Vinton county. We were fishing off the only dock in the entire lake at the time, hell it might still be the only dock in the lake, and it was prob midnight. It was kind of spitting rain, kind of chilly, crazy windy, and we werent catching many fish. We decided to pack things up and head back to the car. Heath got up from his lawn chair and started to gather some things when a gust of wind kicked up and blew the lawn chair into the water and with it, the still lit lantern. It stayed lit, believe it or not, for about a tenth of a second. Panic ensued, mainly in part due to the fact that my dad was a hard ass and was likely to be ultra pissed about his lantern being dropped into an average at best catfishing lake. The water wasnt that deep so after gathering our witts, we shined a flashlight on the subject at hand and realized that we could hook the lantern and raise it from the depths. The next day, a 13 year old (yours truly) while dad was at work, completely disassembled the lantern, changed the fuel, put a new mantle on, lubed moving parts and re-glazed the sub-routine without anyone in a position of authority being the wiser. The thing worked like a champ, you would never know it had been drowned the night before.

I got more,  and considering how bad Ive sucked this season, these lame old stories are prob far more interesting then hearing about me losing another tournament because I cant drag a fish out of anything other then open water.

Later

S.T.P.