So Mike and I spent all of last week working in Chicago. Worked our asses off, had a great time out too.
I managed to pick up a nasty cold or flu or something.
I finished out the week thanks to a box of Sudafed and a bottle of Motrin. And a little bit of booze.
Saturday morning, 4:30am came FAST. I felt like a huge bucket of crap, and the weather wasn't looking so great for the day but I managed to roll out and get to the marina by 6am. Fell asleep in the truck waiting for Mike to arrive. Got a text about 6:20..."You here?"
I opened the truck door and Mike had shown up, loaded up the boat and was ready to go. Awesome.
Got to our favorite Perch spot in about ten minutes and started yanking in 10" fish left and right. We thought that we were going to have a great day so we decided to not even bother keeping any Perch under 11 inches. Caught an 11.5 and a 12" as the wind picked up, the whitecaps started crashing and the rain moved in. %$*#!!! Just what I needed. I was feeling like a baked ass pie, and barely able to cast; I was sitting down and fishing most of the time.
We moved in to more protected water to fish and ride out the storm. We caught a bunch of little fish, but nothing of size.
Storm cleared so we got fuel and moved around a little more. Nothing more of any size. "We better get back out to the honey hole."
Went back out into the bigger water and found that it had started to calm a bit. I loaded up on the Sudafed, Motrin and water. 30 minutes later I was feeling a little better. Fish were biting, but we were still having trouble hitting the goal we had set. Finally a 10.5" WP....in the bucket she went. The clock was ticking and we were getting a little nervous. We lowered our goal enough so that we could get our 5 fish limit. Got 2 more nice 10.5" fish to fill the bucket. The tourney was being judged on a 5 fish weight and all 5 were pretty decent. We were kicking ourselves for throwing back some of the earlier fish. Oh well.....
Headed back to the dock with our fish, cleaned up the boat real quick and went to the weigh in. Looking around at other people's catches we felt pretty good about not being in LAST place.....a big fear of ours.
We were the 5th boat to weigh in.....4.82 pounds for our 5 fish. the biggest weigh in so far. "Oh HELL yeah!"
Cut to the chase.....we ended up in second place out of 30 boats. We got beat by about 4 ounces...probably the difference between the fish we kept and the fish we threw back.
Oh well...the fella that won had a VERY nice spread of fish. I think we had the biggest single fish of the day, but he had 5 solid fatties.
We caught almost 100 White Perch throughout the day, and caught 7 different species, including Rockfish, White Perch, Spot, Catfish, Bluegill, Croaker and a HUGE blue crab on my Beetlespin...lol.
Enjoyed 2 beers with Mike before going home and back to sleep around 4pm. Slept for about a million hours and I'm finally feeling pretty decent today.
White Perch Tournament 7-14-2012
Linear Mode
