Grand River D&R Practice
Seems strange to have my 2nd weekend tournament of the year in July. But here we are and it was on the fickle Grand River. My only experience fishing the river in June wasn’t a good one. 2 fish in a Monday night tournament but that was ok because Trevor and I would be starting completely fresh.
I took Friday off and we headed to the river to see what was going on. I didn’t have any real plan other than we were going to launch in Bruce’s and start running whatever. We picked up a couple buzzbaits and started covering some water hoping to find an early bite. We weren’t even around good stuff but just trying to gauge what the river was like at it’s current stage and that it was lower than last year. It became apparent that they were in a biting mood because even around not great looking water they were smacking the buzzbait all around everywhere we went. No real quality anywhere but I at least felt confident I could drop the trolling motor in on tournament day and get a few bites.
We kept moving and dialing into some specifics. Then the specifics became call your shot repeatable. Then the quality starting showing up and by the end of the day we were feeling pretty good about things. We probably went through about 60 bites and didn’t swing on anything but a some reaction bites and had around 18 pounds between fish we were able to shake off or landed. We had a moving bait bite going and a flipping bite going. If things didn’t change much it had the potential to be a good one. However it is the Grand River and change is inevitable. I’d already started mentally preparing myself to relocate them based on the forecasted wind and weather. Although I was cautiously optimistic that the forecast might help us. I was just hoping it wouldn’t end up like most of my Grand River events and I’m still searching for fish number 4 at 1 o’clock but somehow end up with a decent bag. It is way more fun to not be sweating it all day and if things went according to plan in this one we were going to make a mess!