Houghton Lake - Practice
I don’t have a ton of experience oh Houghton Lake, an NBAA Classic probably close to 20 years ago in the Spring and then again, the year we had the D&R Classic there. However in that classic I learned exactly what I needed to look for and I knew it would involve a lot of driving around. I don’t usually pre practice for a classic but this seemed like one it could be extremely beneficial. So a few weeks before the event I picked a nice day and headed up.
I pulled right in on the area that clued me in to what to look for and instantly caught a few. From that moment I knew I was going to catch them in this tournament. I already had some more spots like it that I found while driving around in the tournament last time. I would check them too and confirm the presence of some nice smallmouth bass. I would eventually stumble upon a mega wad of them and by the end of the day I had compiled a nice weight and a solid amount of spots. I even found some largemouth by accident in a very specific weed patch that I hoped would still play by the tournament. Ideally I would catch smallies in the morning and then find a way to supplement that with some nice green ones in the afternoon. My smallmouth weight far surpassed anything from the tournament we had there before so I was pretty excited. It was a long day with all that driving but seemed like it might be worth it.
Leading up to official practice the forecast kept getting colder and colder with a major cold front during the event. I decided I was going all in on smallmouth at that point and was going to try and find as many spots as I could on Friday. Of course the wind was also going to be a problem both during the official practice day and during day 1 of the event. I was going to be rolling solo in this event as Trevor had a commitment to fish a college event on Lake Dardanelle in Arkansas. I knew this would make it tougher on me especially with capitalizing on bite windows and dealing with culling. But the fish are so specific there I would at least always have a bait in productive water. I got on the water as early as possible on the official practice day (7 am) so I could hopefully check that school without being seen. Let’s just say there were a bunch of them there, I made one cast and got out of there. This would be one tournament I could put a good boat number to use as I knew I wouldn’t be the only one to find it. There wasn’t really anything there like many of the places I found but Humminbird MEGA side imaging had no problems revealing the school of bass. It had the numbers and the size and I would almost guarantee whoever got it could get a top 5 bag on day 1. I would stumble upon another place that was absolutely loaded but I had no idea about the quality of them. I made one cast and caught a decent one and left. MEGA 360 really does a great job of showing how many are down there in shallow water.
I found a bunch more places throughout the day including a couple that I thought might be sneaky ones. I also found the community hole of Houghton Lake but did it ever look good and there were a bunch of fish there. By the end of the day I had an A and a B spot with a bunch of C spots I could rotate in. Ideally I was hoping to get spot A or B and get 17+ pounds then head to the community area and hopefully get a couple upgrades while also burning other peoples fish for the next day. I had one school in particular I really hoped to save for day 2 and had no intentions of going there. That is what makes these 2 day events so fun. There are other strategies and it totally takes the luck factor out of things.
The biggest question in this tournament would be boat draw. You could have all the best stuff and never get to any of it. I felt I had enough stuff that even if I didn’t get my best spots I could still catch enough to stay relevant. It was going to be interesting to see how this would play out.