White Lake HOTD – 2023
The potential for nasty storms were predicted for this years HOTD on White Lake. It is always White Lake where there are storms involved for some reason. It didn’t stop anyone from showing up and the storms never materialized. I’m going to have to say that was the biggest turnout I’ve seen with 88 boats. It was going to be crowded but we all knew that going into the event so I wasn’t going to let that bother me. Trevor and I weren’t in the early draw so we knew that we would have a bad boat number (which I actually prefer there). We didn’t practice but confidence was pretty high we could catch some decent fish in the afternoon. The morning was going to be all about trying to find a couple good ones. Big baits only for us!
Our first area yielded a fairly quick bite. I flipped the fish in, grabbed the line, and the fish came off and bounced right back out! No worries it was just a 2 pounder but maybe it was a sign of things to come. We just decided to cover some water with reaction baits hoping to hone in on a school or snatch a decent bite early. Our first 2 keepers came at the same time and while neither were worth anything it was nice to have some in the boat. That was the last tiny bit of excitement for a long time. It was so bad I don’t even have anything to report about for a while. We kept moving around, checking different areas of the lake, flipped some in the narrows. We did fish some wood and number 3 was all bowed up on a jig and just came off. Hard to say how big it was but I would have liked to find out. We had a couple of other fish on for a few seconds, jumped off a 2.5 pounder on a senko, and added 2 more unspectacular fish to the bag somewhere along the line. No worries as we have some special stuff that usually kicks out enough to get paid in the afternoon.
It came time to run that stuff and the first spot produced number 5 on a carolina rig but no other bites. The next spot produced another Carolina Rig fish, I never got a really great look at this fish but it was another at least 2.5 pounder. It also managed to throw the hook on the jump and shut down the rest of the school. No worries we still had more places to check. The next place actually added a smallmouth to our bag and while not big at least culled for us. The next 2 places were going to be pretty critical. However, the one had no fish on it and the other had a boat on top of it. Those dreams were crushed but we still had a couple hours to come up with something. We made one nice cull in the last 20 minutes on a fish we saw surface. Trevor was able to get a frog over there and after some patient twitching the fish just couldn’t stand it. Before that we had lost another fish that was heavy. Undetermined if it was a bass or not, there are a lot of dogfish in that lake right now. At the end of the day I’d estimate we had a whopping 11.5 pounds and with a long bag line and no need for points we decided to dump them instead of weighing them in for no reason.
It was just one of those events that happen once in a while. You ride the struggle bus all day long and never really get on anything good. Sometimes those days work out just fine on paper and get you get a few of the right bites and sometimes they work out where there is no point to weigh your fish in. Sure, we lost a couple fish but was it enough where perfect execution would have gotten us past the 13.5 mark and into check range? Either way it is always good to be figuring things out on the fly during a tournament and while this one didn’t work out I am not going to let it bother me. On to Muskegon D&R this weekend and who knows what to expect out there. I definitely need a hot lap around Muskegon for practice.