White Lake HOTD - Tournament 2024
Rain was imminent for tournament day but hopefully the storms would hold off. I don’t like fishing in the rain but I really don’t like fishing in lightning. This only happens on White Lake, I’m not sure I’ve fished a rain tournament on the west side on any other fishery other than White. But I’ve definitely fished some nasty ones on White Lake. The game plan was pretty simple for Andy and I. With a bad boat number I had to live by my rule of not passing up anything good. That has served me well especially on White. I had high hopes we could get into an area that is often overlooked but has paid off for me many times in the past.
It’s an area and not a spot so it could handle a few boats but where I really wanted to be was vacant to start the day. I had a bunch of room to move around and I thought for sure we would at least catch a quick limit especially since we had also gotten some bites there in practice. But where were the bites? No where that’s where. We did finally get a keeper right before we left but it was a surprising start for sure. Not often have I run that program in a big event and not ended up with a few fish and at least a 3 pounder. We slid into the next area which I was surprised was overlooked by competitors. Things started trending in the right direction as we filled a limit in no time. Nothing big but it was a start and there were a couple that would do as our smallest fish if we got some big bites.
It was time to cover some water and hopefully land on some big bites. Conditions were perfect for topwater and reaction baits. We were mixing that up but keeping the slower moving baits honest. Literally 0 bites where we had caught our biggest fish in practice even though it was the perfect water for the conditions. Maybe it was going to be a weird day even though it felt like they should be biting good. I hit some deep coontail next hoping for a big bite and on my second cast with a worm the rod loaded up. It was a decent cull for us and I was feeling good about there being more in that patch. That was it, not another bite. Conditions were going from windy to calm at this point and we just kept moving and throwing whatever felt right for the conditions. The problem was that none of it was working.
Finally we got a good bite off some wood but going with the theme of struggle for the day. It just came off halfway to the boat. It just seemed like no matter what we did that we couldn’t get into a groove or get a clue that we were on the right path. I hit some specific stuff next because we needed to make some culls and even that wasn’t that great. We did get rid of the rest of the small ones and at least could salvage the day with a couple 3+ pounders or a big bite. There was going to be a whole lot of NONE of that the rest of the day. We did at least find a windblown area that they were biting some reaction baits like we expected but none of them were nice ones.
Andy and I were certainly scratching our heads at the end of the day as to what we missed. To make it all worse the weigh in was full of nice bags and everyone blasted them on stuff that we tried and tried and tried again. Andy is a topwater guru and we never caught a fish on top despite the rest of the field blasting them on it. I never even picked mine up because Andy catching them on it is such a good indicator of if it is something I should be throwing. To make the weigh in even more crushing he got a call that one of his kids was going to the hospital for appendicitis and there was no way we were getting back quick enough. Congrats to Dave and Kyle for the win and everyone else who did well. I don’t know what to chalk our performance up to other than it was just one of those days that happens every so often. It could have been much worse too as we still had almost 13.5 pounds but when White Lake fires 13 pounds doesn’t seem like much of a victory.