Last week, Greg and I couldn’t resist the itch and signed up for the first MWC walleye tournament of the year in Spring Valley on the Illinios River. Both of our schedules are kind of wild this time of year, so we knew the only way to do it was with limited prefishing time, but what the heck, we had both been there before and were confident on that system.
I was off Monday and Tuesday before the tournament, but had to do some final rigging on the boat, and get 
the motors broken in. I trailer-ed it over to the Vermilion river on a snowy day to launch it and at least get the kicker broken in up and down the river (only open water anywhere around). I figured this would at least gain us 2 hours of prefishing time since Friday before the tournament was going to be our only day on the Illinios before the tourney. Funny story… Its a white out and I’m hunkered down trying to stay warm in the back corner of the boat on the tiller, no one at the console, and a cop comes flying into the Quarker State lot right next to the river. He looks closely at me, smiles, waves and drives on his way. Weird, I think. Then I get back to the ramp and the dock master tells me some lady called the cops on me because she thought there was a blue boat driving down the river with no one in it!
Anyways, Greg and I drove late through the night Thursday to get there for a few hours of rest before we were up early and on the water for big motor break-in and our 1 day of prefish. The break-in on the new Starcraft with Mercury Motors combo was nice, because its 1 hour at high rpm, in the 35-50mph range, this allowed us to scout and re familiarize ourselves with the river going up and down. We stopped at the dam, and fished our way down… The bite was on! It seemed like everywhere we went, we were sticking nice fat female saugers, exactly what you want in your bag for this tourney. Motor break in – check, prefish – check, rules meeting – check, handline leads and reels rigged – check, cold beer before bed – check, in one long day, we were ready to rock before the first tourney on the year.
Man it was great to hear our boat number called and go ripping up the river at 60 mph on a crisp morning, its was game time, and tournament season is on, it is so on…
Day one was ok, ended in 38th place with 9-some-lbs, not nearly the quality we had the first day. We needed to make a move. Day 2 we decided to stick to a similar game plan, but focus more on our bigger fish spots. We were getting most of our bigger females handlining up and down a break upstream of split rock. Slowly we started piecing together a nice bag and were feeling pretty good. In the last hour we made a move down to a spot downstream of the Vermillion River that hadn’t had much pressure the last few days. Greg stuck two 
17″ females with 30 minutes to go that upgraded us a nice 1lb or so. We ended up weighing in 12lbs, and jumped 36 places to finish in 12th place and bring home some hardware with a nice check.
It was a great way to start the tourney season off and we are ready to rock with some momentum going into back to back MWC and NWT tournaments in Detroit next week. It is here, and it is on, it is so on…
