What a way to start the tournament season in the new Ranger boat! Where do I even begin… I’ve had that boat for a couple months now and just couldn’t wait to unleash it on a full week of practice and a major tournament. It did not disappoint.
Obviously the first part of the equation is finding the fish, Lowrance side imaging was crazy. At first I thought what I was reading was wrong there were so many fish. I had to drop my Aqua-Vu camera down to confirm the thousands of walleyes sitting on some of these flats on the river. Then I started fishing them with the Lowrance Active Target that I just installed before this trip; let me tell you, it is the REAL DEAL. You could actually see how fish were responding to your bait. It became very apparent the a subtle jigging stroke with a minnow or paddle tail was the ticket. I’m not sure I would have figured this out without it.
My program was to set the boat to drift downstream slightly faster than the current, and pitch 1/8 Northland Tackle Fire-Ball jigs with a minnow or 1/8oz Northland Slurp jigs with a paddle tail and swing them behind the boat. Set ups for pitching: 1/8oz Northland Tackle Stand-Up Fire-Ball jig on and 7’ Medium Fast Abu Garcia Veracity with a Pflueger Supreme size 30 and spooled with 8lb Berkley Sensation mono. For dragging: 1/8oz Fire-Ball with a 7’2” Medium Fast Fenwick Elite Tech Walleye Rigging rod with mono as well. I couldn’t imaging better rod an reel setups for this kind of fishing. Those Veracity’s are so sensitive, you can practically fell a fish sniff your bait. And that Elite Tech walleye rod is just soft enough in the top half that it allows the fish to pick up your bait before he ever feels you. I actually did something I HAVEN’T done in a looooooong time, that is jig with mono. When we started to figure out they wanted a super subtle presentation, and even just dragged jig, mono made a lot of sense. It offered that extra stretch and shock absorption given that we were in such shallow water and the fish were really very close to you when you made contact. When you are fishing a tournament this big, against this many good sticks, one subtle thing like this can make the world of difference, this to me was the biggest difference maker. I had a couple rigging rods rigged up from last year with Trilene XL, 8lb. It works fine for dragging or rigging, but my teammate Dusty let me spool up a few extra rods with Berkley Trilene Sensation mono, I was blown away with how well this mono performed. It casted and came off the spool like braid, was very abrasion resistant, had extremely low memory for mono, and never broke on me. From here on out, any mono that I ever put on a spinning reel will be Berkley Sensation.
Day one I was blessed with some fatty prespawn walleye that weighed 15.6lbs and had me sitting in 8th place. Day 2, I actually came in kind of dejected thinking I blew my shot a top 10 coming in with 13.3lbs. Every single one of the 50 some fish we caught day 2 were post spawn and just didn’t have the weight. It turns out that happened to a lot of the field and I actually moved up to 5th place!!! This was big for me on a personal level. Last season I seemed to be cursed with rough day 2s. My goal was to move up. Check. Also, reality is that most of my success on the NWT has been on the Great Lakes, so for those that have just followed my NWT career comes this perception that I am a ‘Great Lakes’ troller. Nothing irks me more than being called a troller. But let’s face it, you grow up and guide on Lake Erie, that’s what people are going to think, it comes with the territory. I know I’m much more than that, I know I can compete on any body of water with a variety of techniques, I guess that’s all that really matters.
The crew I got to travel with and stay with was so much fun… The laughs, hard work, amazing meals, late night map talk; it was just perfect (except that one of us didn’t walk away with the trophy) and there is no way I could have done it without these guys; John Hoyer, Duane Hjelm, Dusty Minke, Dan Smith, Chris Haines, Bruce Basser, Mark VanVliet, Dustin.
Congrats to Chase M. Parsons on the win, way to dial in a big fish program and stick it out! Chase was also pitching a jig and minnow in super shallow water. He was just way south from where I was and way up creek arms on a different grade of fish. Nice work bro!
