Making Lemonade out of Lemons

Last weekend I fished an open tournament on my home lake. I had never fished that particular tournament before and was very excited for the event. The fishing had been really tough for a couple of weeks but in my last day of practice I found a stretch of water that had 6 or 7 Largemouth that were over 5 pounds and several 3's and 4's. This little stretch was only about 150-200 yards long and fairly obscure. Needless to say I was very excited for Saturday morning and the possibility of winning my first tournament.


There was only one other team I was concerned about sharing the water with but they started 3 boats behind us and I knew we could get there first. We blast off and we are 7 or 8 miles up river and everything in the world seems right when the RPM's on my motor go through the roof and we come off plane. My partner says, "what just happened?" and I reply, "we just spun a hub". He asks what next. I explain to him how people who are not mentally retarded would change there prop and be back in the game but I am not one of those guys. My spare prop is in the garage right next to my net that I told you I forgot.

I am about ready to destroy everything in my boat and put my head in the live well and close the lid. The worst part of it is there isn't really anything to fish between where we are and where we have to get back to because the water is all super deep with mostly cliff walls as a shore line. After 10-15 minutes of silence we start discussing possibilities and come to the conclusion that if we can make it back to the flat right above the launch with 2 hours to fish we might be able to scratch out enough of a limit to have something to fish for on Sunday. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it,we had 9 1/2 hours to troll back to the launch.

On our 5 1/2 hour troll back to the flat we decided that 12 pounds was our new goal. The idea was if we could miraculously attain that goal we would possibly be within 4-6 pounds off the lead and still have our good stuff for Sunday. Along the way I end up catching a LM that weighed almost 4 pounds so when we got to the flat we were 1/3 of the way to our goal and feeling pecimistically optimistic. To make an already long story short I ended up catching another miracle LM that was 4 1/2. We weighed 14.3 pounds and 2 pounds off the lead in 3rd place.

I ended up farming a pair of three punders at the boat on Sunday and we slipped to 4th place. The moral of the story here is that we were forced to slow down and fish every square inch of the water in front of us because we had no other choice. We ended up catching fish in water that neither one of us had ever fished before and on several techniques that made very little sense but when you are stuck on 10-15 acres for 4 hours you get boared and start experimenting. I have to say that had it not been for my partners incredibly great attitude and cheerleading we would have been totally screwed. I hope that I never have to repeat that experience but I am glad it happened and we had more fun that day than I would have ever expected to have. I think it was more fun than weighing the 20 pound sack I had envisioned.