D&R Series – White Lake Practice

There’s a little added pressure to have a 2nd good tournament after winning the first one. Points always matter to me but more so after a great start. This tournament was going to be a reschedule from the GTB tournament that was cancelled by weather in June. It was strange earlier this year thinking I wouldn’t fish a weekend tournament on White all year. But here we are, the only problem is it isn’t the White Lake we are all used to.

The last few years of high water has really put a hurting on White Lake’s weeds. Less light penetration = less weeds, many of the places that used to be so productive are now barren. This year we are really starting to see the lasting effects on the fishery. Long gone are the days where I would show up to White with 5 flipping sticks on the deck and stick to rule #1…never go past the trench. I hadn’t fished up there much at all. Just 2 Monday night tournaments and a day back in April. The Monday nighters told me I definitely had to figure something out because my results weren’t that great.

I had a weekend in late July with nothing going on so I figured it would be a good time to go get familiar with how the lake laid out this year. I planned on a lot of time behind the wheel and not much fishing. It was a Sunday afternoon that I headed up and the first thing that shocked me was that the parking lot was totally full and the boat traffic was unbearable. I don’t know what is going on with White this year but the boat traffic is like nothing I have ever seen there. It was going to make idling around with the Humminbirds a pain. I really wanted to check some stuff from the past to see if it was growing again. The answer was a hard no, it was all still garbage. Ok, well I guess I could find some deep weeds somewhere right? A whole lot more no! I did find one isolated patch of coontail in 16 feet. I filed that one away for something to fish on tournament day.

One thing about White Lake is that there are fish EVERYWHERE! If you are driving around side imaging the graph looks like it is on simulator mode with fish all over the place. The only problem is that the place is sucker city. That is what most of those schools are and there are so many it is hard to pick out things that might be bass. I did happen to idle by an object that had some bassy looking spots on the SI. In fact I’d have bet my boat those were bass and a little lightbulb went off. I turned around set up on it and caught about 8 keepers. I could see them swimming around it on the 360 and It was a ton of fun. They were just a bunch of 2 pounders but it felt good to have another direction to look and an insurance spot if things got tough in the event. The next question is could I repeat it? The bottom of White is littered with objects and it’s going to take some real effort to find the ones that are holding bass. After a whole lot of work, I did end up finding 2 more places that were absolutely loaded.

Would it hold up for the event, who knows? I never caught any giants but I did think I could get 13lbs off that stuff no problem. I certainly wasn’t going back there until tournament day. I did find one stretch of grass that looked prime but produced no bites. I definitely was going to check that before the tournament.

Somehow our Monday night was scheduled the same week as the D&R. So we were going to get a couple extra hours of practice. The only problem is it was going to rain and be nasty which makes it a little tougher to find out what is going on. We decided were going to try some other stuff than fishing grass. The plan was to check some hard spots and timber. The C-Flash was on fire on that stuff in the wind and rain. We had a blast and even though we didn’t catch a big bag had another direction to look during practice for the tournament.

One thing that was different about actual practice for this tournament was that we would be practicing on a Saturday. I much prefer to go a couple days in advance vs the day before but I decided not to take a day off of work. We were going to get an early start and hopefully wrap things up early afternoon. As much as I love to fish I wanted to spend some time with the girls this weekend too. We got to Whitehall at 6:30 and the launch was packed with salmon boats already. We already knew we would have to get up there early on tournament day to avoid any parking lot stress. There weren’t many bass guys out that early so we decided to go graph some places looking for more hard spots first thing. We found a couple and no one saw us graphing those areas. There was no point in actually fishing those spots as we were going to in the tournament whether we caught anything or not. I knew we needed to get something going in the grass though. I’m not patient enough to fish hard cover on White Lake for 8 hours nor did I have enough of it to fish that long.

I headed to the biggest grass bed left in the lake. Although much of it isn’t the ideal stuff I still thought it might hold the biggest population of fish. We tried the edges, we tried the inside, we tried the middle, and it all sucked! I think we caught a couple of little ones. There was one place that had a little bit of wood in the area and some depth changes. We caught a couple there but we had a boat practicing pull up 30 yards from us and another boat pull in behind us. We pretty much wrote that spot off as there were boats there all day. Next we checked that grass spot I found a few weeks ago and flipped it fast. We got no bites but it looked right, good and clumpy with no milfoil on the edges. I didn’t really care that we had no bites, we would be back tomorrow. We faded off of that into some sparser stuff and burned one we shouldn’t have. It was a derpy area but usually 5 pounders (5.11 to be exact) don’t lie and we would be back. We made no more casts and kept moving. That fish did tell me that we could catch some of the right ones in and around the grass. We fished a lot of good looking grass with very little success. We found one grass spot that was a wall of deeper coontail. A couple bites that we never set on confirmed it was some juice but who knows if we would ever get on it in the tournament. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful, we added a couple deep spots and found one more grass spot that was holding quality fish. I idled by one of the spots I found a couple weeks ago and excited to have side imaging confirm they were still there. We burned a 4 pounder in the narrows on the way in and were wishing we could have today’s weight tomorrow.

We had about 30 rods strewn about the boat at the end of the day so at the very least we had that narrowed down a bit. I was feeling good after practice but not overly confident. I felt pretty certain we were going to go through some bites on tournament day but I wasn’t sure if we would end up with 12lbs or 18 pounds. All we could do is catch what we could catch and hope for a decent finish.