Classic – Practice
I’ve been looking forward to this one for awhile since the only previous experience I have on Elk/Torch/Skeg was a good one. On top of that we were staying at the Wheat’s which is always a good time! Trevor and I headed north a little early hoping to get some time on other fisheries up there and the weather was perfect for some bay time.
The bay did not disappoint between the smallmouth and cisco. It was a great start to the trip and hopefully the fishing on Elk/Torch was improving. The word from everyone who pre practiced was things were bad bad bad. With one day of practice from 7:00am to 6:00pm we decided to focus all of our attention on Elk. If things were tough I assumed we would need every second of fishing time on tournament day and Elk is where I have done well before.
We started our day idling in the dark and probably didn’t get rods out for almost 2 hours. We found a bunch of stuff that I thought we should be looking for. Grass patches, wood, cribs, and bait. Bait (small perch) was literally everywhere so it was best to just ignore where that was. You could see areas where it was more balled up and I had more confidence there were some game fish around those areas. With no wind forecasted on Saturday we assumed we would have to catch them deep. Sunday we had a big south blow coming so we also spent time finding shallow areas for when the wind blew. We actually had more success every time we went shallow. If we could survive the calm day on Saturday I was confident we could catch some on Sunday. The only areas we didn’t explore were close to Elk Rapids and the far north end of the lake which I think were big mistakes on our part. Exploring known places like the Torch River was probably also a mistake. We did head to Skeg for a hot minute just to see if one would eat a big topwater. We confirmed that and headed back to Elk.
At the end of the day we didn’t really know what we were around and we just hoped we could survive Saturday. As always with the D&R Classic there is a banquet where usually we get boat numbers have raffles and usually the team of the year gets their trophies. I hate to say anything negative but attendance was very low, no boat numbers, and no trophies. Compared to the banquets of the past this was much different and overall pretty weak. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit disappointed to not get team of the year trophies as a lot of hard work went into this season. We did get 1000 bucks at the weigh in Sunday for being highest finishing team in a Nitro which was awesome! We headed back to the Wheats and prepared for the next day. Not knowing really what to expect with boat number the next day there was no plan set in stone.