White Lake HOTD 2024 Round 2
With 2 back to back tournaments coming up on White Lake. I was ready for my revenge tour after a subpar performance at the first HOTD event. Instead of practicing the week of the event I decided to get out there 2 weeks in advance and graph around. I was feeling really good about knowing what I was looking for. It was going to be easier to find it with no one else practicing. So I put in a 12.5 hour day and felt pretty good about what I’d found. Not that I caught a bunch of giants or anything but that I had a lot of places I could catch fish and some new really high percentage stuff.
Trevor and I fished the Monday nighter that week and really struggled. As in only had 2 fish until the last 20 minutes. Not looking good especially since I had a special guest this weekend while Trevor was fishing the College National Championship on Lake Hartwell in South Carolina. Mike Elkins and I always talk about going fishing together but we were actually going to go this weekend. If you know Mike than you know you are in for a fun time, especially as excited as he was for this event! Despite Monday’s struggles, I had high hopes we could catch a nice bag on Saturday.
One disadvantage to not getting in the early draw is that we would be one of the last boats out. There really wasn’t anything I felt super strongly about anyway and the plan was to just let the morning figure itself out. I knew we would be able to get some solid fish later in the day so the real goal here was to just get 2 big bites in the morning. We did actually get to start on a really good stretch. So my hopes were high, I didn’t expect to actually get a good spot and expected more to just be covering water instead of making some casts into something juicy. We got no love right away other than a couple weak bites on a chatterbait. We did score a topwater fish before we started covering some water but that would be the end of the action for that area. I was surprised at some of the other stuff that was devoid of boats so we made a move. We were covering water and working plastics in on some of the juicy stuff. Keeper number 2 came aboard here, followed by a bunch of short bites. We both had a bite that almost took the rod out of our hands but never hooked up. We added keeper number 3 here on a chatterbait but none of them were fish you would want to weigh in. The bite window was closing fast for getting a random one.
Somewhere along the way we filled a limit and did some culling. We did have some excitement with a nice pike on a spot that Mike has previously won a D&R tournament off of. Nothing was coming easy and nothing was screaming this is what we need to be doing to catch the right ones. But on White Lake I often find if you just keep going through likely areas you are going to locate a concentration of fish. Much easier to do when there aren’t a lot of boats around. Not that the boats are even always exactly where you want to be but they are close enough that I am not comfortable pulling in. I had a bunch of stuff in my back pocket that was really high percentage stuff. Places where you can sometimes catch 3 or 4 on consecutive casts and often solid fish. One of the first places we hit like that I hadn’t even ever fished. It just had all the right stuff so it was on the list for tournament day. We caught our biggest fish of the day there and if we could get a few more fish like that to fire on the other spots we would be in good shape.
We actually had good building blocks to a nice bag if we could just get a couple big bites. So we kept poking in and out of the grass, out deeper, up on the flats, and just trying to get a clue on what to do. Things still felt right for a big topwater and we were going to keep that honest. One of those periods of trying it out again produced a solid fish and then a missed opportunity at a solid fish. We thought maybe we could run with that but it was just that one small flurry of activity. Then we had another small flurry of activity flipping coontail. It just seemed like something wanted to bust wide open but we struggled to duplicate it. We were just a good bite or 2 from having a nice bag but time just kept on ticking. All the stuff I was really counting on for the afternoon just wasn’t working. It was really strange but hopefully those fish are saving themselves for D&R this weekend. There were a couple moments of excitement left though. Mike had an old man moment where he dropped his rod in the water and another “big one” on that suffered some major shrinkage. You just never know what is going to come up when you are getting them out of those weeds, they all feel big.
At the end of the day we had done our job of catching solid fish but just couldn’t get any difference makers to go. It was painful to finish middle of the pack with 13.71 but even more painful when we looked at the weights. Guys really caught them again and I don’t know where we went wrong. We got plenty of bites throughout the day doing a bunch of different things. I’ve certainly had much worse days there numbers wise. I know one thing I’m really struggling at what to do to get a big bite but I guess I’ve got another tournament to figure that out. I didn’t spend much time directly practicing for that one either. A few hours on morning before some scheduled night work. I spent the whole time just trying to find a way to get a big bite and dreaming that I was salmon jigging instead. That is a whole different blog post though.
But just to kind of wrap up this last event. We caught fish, had a great time, Mike made some awesome sandwiches, but the big bites just didn’t come. I think we both had big dreams of a hero pic with a big bag of bass and a nice check courtesy of West Michigan Bass but this is the best I can do!
