National Championship and Not so Champion performance

[fishon1219]

Last week I spent my time on Beautiful Lake Cumberland participating in the FOM 2007 National Championship and wanted to share my Un-Champion like performance with everybody.

Practice March 31- We woke up at 6:30 am to get started and we were greeted with a study rainfall and decided to sleep a little more and hopefully it would blow through. We started fishing about 10:00am and went to a small creek about half way down the lake that had lots of different type of structure so we could get a feel for were the fish were holding. We started out fishing a bluff bank with Black shall rock the transitioned into a crushed looking gray shale at the water level and on the very first point in the creek I landed a 4 1/2 lb smallie on a LuckyCraft Staysee 98 I think and continued fishing all the way to the back of the creek catching a few small KY spot's and a couple more just barely keeper smallies.

We had decided to go for the win and focus our practice on Smallies as the norm for this time of year was winning with smallies.

The creekbank on the other side was all large slab rock that was a tan color in apperance and didn't get a bite on that side all the way back out. We moved own to the next creek that again had the black shale and the grey crushed gravely stuff and also caught some spots and 1 more just keeper smallie and they all came within the first 2 points in this creek.

This pattern held up throughout the day.

Day 2 April 1- We woke again to rain and were on the water by 8:30 today and set up with the same pattern as the day before but the jerk bait bite just died for me and my partner was catching several fish on a bone colored Original Wiggle Wart. He landed a very nice smallie that was right at 5lbs and several more that were right at the 18" size limit before I wised up and tied on a baby bass chartruse Wiggle wart and started catching fish immediatly. We tried to vary our pattern a little bit today and fished the very backs of the main lake pockets were the brush was flooded over. hey call them run-ins down there but we had no luck.

Day 3 April 2 Today would be a short day due to the meeting and we woke up to be suprised that it wasen't raining but the temp had dropped and the wind was blowing but it was still manageable. We trailer the boat down to the Dam and practiced here to see if we could get something going. We Bent over the hooks on the baits so as not to stick any fish and had several attackers on the same pattern as the day's before on the main lake point's and secondary points in the pockets. Classic pre-spawn Smallie pattern. So we were pumped about the first day of the tournament and fished until 2:30 and went and got everything ready for day one.