D&R Sports Muskegon 2024 - Practice
It was cool that D&R switched the schedule around this year and started somewhere different. Regardless of where we were, early June is a scary time. Post spawn, alewife influence, smallmouth on beds, an no particular way of catching them really strong. This is the most difficult time of year for me to truly target bigger fish. They can be deep, shallow, or anywhere in between. It just seems like you have to go through a lot of them to get the right ones or stumble up on a random one…if you are lucky. I did win a D&R several years ago this same time of year with a mixed bag of alewife eating largemouth and spawning smallies. I had big plans to start my focus on that same program.
However things happened fast this year and it was looking like it would be unlikely that we could really lean on the smallmouth on beds and I wasn’t really into spending time in the channel. I’d been on Muskegon a couple times this spring and had some ideas. It didn’t appear catching largemouth was going to be all to difficult in this event. Before I actually got on the water to practice I was feeling really confident about dropping a big bag of green ones on the scales. I had a rare opportunity to sneak out early in the week for a few hours and check out the smallmouth deal. There were some signs of life but honestly my heart wasn’t really in it. I knew I was going to be able to catch a bunch of fish just fishing and I wasn’t going to invest hours and hours looking for the few sight fish that were left. I pretty much wrote that off and took the day off work Thursday to look around the lake.
I try and practice on Thursdays because there is usually less traffic and I can be more effecient. Imagine my surprise when I rolled up to fishermans landing and the ramp was full. There were even people directing traffic and I couldn’t comprehend what was happening. I knew it wasn’t good for me though because not only were people going to be on stuff I wanted to look at but I was going to do my best to stay out of their way. I remember a long time ago I was fishing a tournament and ended up in the same area as another angler who wasn’t in the tournament that day. I didn’t know him at all but we said hi and what not and he asked if I was fishing that tournament. I said yes and he said he was going to move on so I could have the whole area instead of just one bank of the river. Because he offered to let me fish that whole area I got to hit the best spot and boated a 4 pounder. I haven’t forgotten that and in the rare case that I’m on the water just fishing while a tournament is going on. I will always concede an area to someone in the event and try my hardest to stay out of everyone’s way.
It did however derp up my practice day pretty bad. It was inefficient, which was exaggerated by the extremely windy conditions. I did get on the water really early though so I could scout out some alewife activity. The only problem with that is there was none. Did it already happen? Has it not happened yet? I have no idea but my dreams of finding a spot with bass blowing alewives out of the water had faded. I’m not going to lie, so was my confidence. I wasn’t catching the size I needed and the numbers were less than I expected too. However I wasn’t even going to dabble in the places I really thought I could do damage. I had one area I really wanted by the end of the day though. When I saw all the alewives on my Humminbird MEGA Live I knew it was about to go down. I had high hopes the bass could keep them pushed in there and made a few casts just to be sure. I caught 3 of them and decided I should quit. It certainly wasn’t going to be a place where I could win the event but I felt really good about getting a good start there. I had 4 or 5 more places that I felt good about getting a lot of numbers with a chance at some quality. But things were really going to ride on all the stuff I never looked at. I’ve got no problem just waiting to fish stuff in the tournament vs wasting time trying to get bites off places I already have a lot of confidence in.
Who knew how it was going to shake out. It was just as likely that I could catch 20 pounds as 12 (although I was going to catch a lot of keepers). I really was just hoping to get a good start and then hope my other stuff was as good as I expected it to be.