Big Stack Practice - Muskegon

As you could imagine I’d been anxiously awaiting this event all summer. A chance for 14k on my home lake was pretty exciting! I wasn’t really sure what my practice strategy would be. Check a bunch of lakes? Put in a bunch of time on Muskegon? Or not put much time in at all? I settled on mixing up some days on Muskegon with dabbling in a few things on other lakes.

My Muskegon days were never crazy but it wasn’t hard to get bites. You never know when you’ll get an August Muskegon tournament where it seems like it might be hard to catch 5. Those are never fun! Every day I’d put together a solid bag fishing different ways and areas. I had quite a bit of new stuff going into this one and I really tried hard to find isolated small spots vs large areas that had fish. Ideally, I’d have a bunch of grass fish but that never really clicked for me. I had a couple places but nothing that would really waste too much time. I felt really good about this being a pure Muskegon tournament and hoped we would get the wind to lock us in with a small craft advisory. I had all day Saturday during the rain to sit at home and think about options all day. I also had about 30 rods to get ready for this event because I could potentially be fishing so many ways.

Then we got a curve ball and smallmouth were going to be a factor in this event. Despite all the hard work I put in during practice I knew I wouldn’t have time to get to a lot of that stuff. A lot of my local advantage was going out the window especially with being able to run in this event. It was still up in the air whether an overnight small craft would hold or not. It was gone tournament morning and we were free to go as we please. Guys were definitely going to catch them and I figured it would take 17 to get paid and 20 plus to win.