Golden Hook Bassers               

July 27^th Lake Alexander

            I have been looking forward to this tournament.  I had got to pre-fish twice and had two good days of locating fish and dialing in what they would bite.  Now I just needed them to cooperate today.  I have a guy which is new to our club this year and the first two tourneys he finished in the boater won the event and then yesterday Ozzy broke the streak and now I get him, by the way his name is Steve Walker.

The first thing I plan on doing this morning is hitting the reed and rock island where I located some nice small mouth with a topwater bait called a Heddon Zara Spook Jr.  We approached the back side of the island and I drop the trolling motor and start fishing I begin to realize that this is the wrong island so I pack up and move to the right one what an idiot I am.  Anyway now on the right island and working my spook to know avail I decide we wasted enough time on the smallmouth so I went to a spot that had a number of largemouths on it and I finally set the hook into my first fish of the day a small keeper largemouth.  I am using a 1/2oz green pumpkin all terrain tackle jig and shortly after I catch another small keeper then miss a good bite, we worked back through the area and I get bite again and hammer my jig into a decent 2lb fish and land it and put it into the livewell.  I proceeded to hook another fish and as it comes up and jumps half way back to the boat it comes unbuttoned from my jig and swims away and it was close to 3 lbs.  That really sucked and apparently shut down any other fish in the area because we couldn’t get a bite for sometime and that means off to my next spot a ways down the lake as we begin fishing I explain to Steve that there is a mix of largemouth and smallmouth along this weedline and to also throw up into the weeds and as soon as I finish saying that Steve threw his jig and spider grub up into the weeds and he set the hook and landed his first fish of the day not big but a start as we move farther down the weed line and start getting close to my prime area  I see Wayne Pacyga’s boat down fishing some reeds within view of me so I hold up my approach and kind of fish dead water until he moves on and 10 minutes later or so he leaves and I move into my spot and immediately a fish whacks my jig and I flip a 2 pounder or so into the boat and throw back out to the same spot and a fish cracks my All-Terrain jig and Steve nets a 3 pounder for me and there is my limit, I threw to the exact spot over and over and caught fish after fish.  They were a bunch of 2-1/2 pounders and Steve could not get a bite and I moved my boat so he could get a better angle and that did not help him and then he stuck a fish on his spider jig and I netted a nice 3 pounder for him and then the bite was over I had a nice limit of fish and Steve had two fish.  We moved to a long underwater point that in practice it seemed like you could catch a small fish at will on a crankbait so I was hoping to get Steve to fill out his limit, I also had him come up to the front of the boat and had him throw my Rapala DT 10 (bluegill) up along the weed break.  Low and behold he caught three 12 to 13 inch fish pretty quickly and we both had our limit so we decided to hawg hunt, nothing but jigs looking for bigger fish, on the backside of the long point I struck and landed a fish that culled one and helped a tiny bit.  The day came to an end and we were weighing our fish and as I could see no one really had anything special so I bagged my fish and brought them to the scale and weighed just under 13 pounds and won the tournament.  Guy Knudson who has been in first for the year weighed 11 something for second and stole big bass pot from me, anyway I gained some weight on his lead and came away pleased with the day.

Until next time on Crank It Up Pro……….