Day 1 - Houghton Lake
The ramp here can be kind of a cluster since it is just a tiny boat basin with the channel/immediate outside of it so shallow that your boat will bump the bottom. The tournament staff did an awesome job directing us in and out both days. Anyway we had a 6:30 meeting to attend to get that all important boat number. I normally don’t really care but getting a good draw here might be critical to getting a good start. Especially because I knew other competitors would want to start on the place we hoped to get. However boat 59 wasn’t going to do us any favors on day 1. But it should come in handy on day 2 since boat numbers get reversed. At least the days forecast was to be overall pleasant and we were going to make the most of whatever we could get.
It was no surprise there were 4 boats on our starting location. We wheeled out and stopped on an unproven shell bed for about 10 casts as it was going to be unlikely that we would get our next few spots either. We probably should have given that area a bit more time but it was off to the next one. This spot was loaded in practice although we never fished there. I could see enough of them on MEGA SI that there was no point in checking. Of course, there was a boat right on it and that was the theme for the rest of the event. We never ever got to fish there. We kept running to some other places that had some fish in practice but were also close together. These weren’t spots that we expected a big wad of them to be on but we better start catching what we can. They proved to be weak as well and we only picked 2 fish off one of them. One dink keeper and one ok fish.
Time to keep running while they were supposed to be biting, although we were running out of prime time. The next place produced our biggest bite of practice but was dead today (and the next day), not even a bump. The next place was one I had high hopes for but we were getting there pretty late in the morning. The good news was they were still there. Right away we lost a good one and a minute later we hooked up with “the one”. One of those fish that is just different and obviously in a different class. This one was going to make or break our day and sticking with the theme of last event…broke it. Just defeating but there were plenty more smallmouth around and we had to at least catch a limit here. We got a limit in the boat but nothing we really wanted to weigh in. A couple small ones that absolutely needed to get culled out though. Why were we losing these big ones though? We were throwing single hooked bottom contact baits which usually get fish to the boat. Not much we could do but just hope to get enough bites to recover even though we knew there’s no way we were getting another bite from a fish like “the one”.
We just kept pulling in on stuff that was right and revisiting a couple places. Our next spot produced a cull and the biggest fish of the day. I could see a 3 pack of them swimming on 360 and Trevor and I both had our baits on either side of them. They just had to swim to the side and not straight out or something. Luckily they intersected with Trevor’s bait but that was the only good bite we got there. I mentioned in the practice blog that another area would end up being super important in this event. It was a long way from where we were fishing now but once we got there it didn’t take long to start getting some bites. Unfortunately, the 2 biggest bites both came off near the boat, it is even worse when you can see them. They weren’t coming off on jumps either as nothing was really going airborne today. But based on a lot of the fish we landed and how far the bait was in their throat. I think they were getting it so far back and holding on so tight that we just weren’t getting the hook in there. We did cull a few times there but we were kind of out of stuff to run and it has been proven that we struggle just fishing around on that lake. I’d rather spend time side imaging that just being unproductive so we did some driving around and uncovered a few things but nothing that we caught them off of.
It was getting near the end of the day and we made a last ditch effort to get to a grass clump we caught one off of in practice. Sure enough we culled one more time there caught some that didn’t help. We had another missed opportunity there but who knows how big the fish was. We’d still landed 15-20 keepers on the day but they just didn’t weight much. Just one of the 4 good ones we lost would have helped us tremendously. Or we get them all and “the one” and who knows how far up the leaderboard we end up. But I can promise you we weren’t the only ones to lose difference making bites that day.
It was disappointing overall but we didn’t have any small ones either. Just solid smallmouth that many times we would be happy to have. Our 13.88 put us in 21st place and a clean slate for tomorrow. Day 2 would bring no pressure and just be another day to go catch what we can. There was no big plan to “swing for the fences”. We felt confident that if we just timed some things right and worked hard the bites would come for an opportunity to move up.