Bass Cat Owners Invitational

[Dan]

My son just called me and said that a couple of our Tear Drop guys won the Bass Cat Owners Invitational. Can't seem to find anything on the web to verify and don't have their cell number. I'll try and get some info and post as soon as I do.

[blakstr1]

thats GREAT!  smbassman was down there fishing it...i'm sure he'll give a report as soon as he's back.

[smbassman]

Yep, I'm back at work !

I'm still catching up today but I'll try a summary.  First of all, I have to say congratulations to Gary Evans and Dave Baker.  I have never met them but for the first time in this tournament and they win it - that is impressive!!!

Well the week was full of changing conditions - weather and fish.  Several fronts blew through and weather ranged from 85deg, dead calm, bluebird sky to 50deg, 30mph wind, and pouring down rain  - every day was different.  On top of this, most of the fish were just finishing up the spawn, some had been spawned out for a while, and there were a few left that I think are waiting for some stable weather to move up.  Basically the fish were really scattered.  We(my wife and I) caught fish all week but struggled to put together a pattern since we caught fish at every depth zone, on every type of structure available and on various lures.  But we could not find anything that held up for more than a fish or two. 

On a typical day, I would start in an area that was chosen for that day of practice and work through various lures, retrieves etc. and finally catch a fish.  Then try repeating that in similar areas without another bite.  So we would go back to changing up lures, retrieves and finally catch another fish in a totally different way.  This repeated daily and was very frustrating even though we were catching fish, it doesn't help to nail down a technique for tournament day.  The one thing I decided on for the tournament days was to fish the shallower coves since I had caught the best quality fish flipping in trees for freshly spawned out females.  All the fish caught this way had hollow guts, but I had a 3# and a 5.5#'er early in the week so I thought focusing on these larger fish was the way to go. The 5.5 was definitely the biggest bass I have ever caught(easily an inch longer than my 22" golden rule), and would have been close to 7+ with a full belly.  Another reason for this choice was the knowledge that the previous two years had been won in shallower stained water. 

So day one started with running into a wall of dense fog half way to my starting spot and had to go the last 2 miles off plane.  When I arrived, I was happy to see only one other boat had drove through the fog to get there.  I started on the tree that the 5.5 came from and nothing, fished the rest of the trees in the cove and nothing.  Fished the outer points from the cove and one short fish.  Started to fish down the shore and picked up a few more short fish.  I had a perfect opportunity to catch some good fish, but didn't do it.  We actually got to cover close to 1/2 mile of unfished shoreline before the fog lifted and the boats began pouring in.  Did I mention there were 605 boats in the tournament this year?  Having that much unfished water is more than you can hope for.

After getting over run with boats, we decided to try a few more coves and found them to be full of boats as well.  After 6hrs, I decided the plan wasn't the right choice for the conditions and reasoned that the largemouth that spawned the week prior had already recovered and headed to deeper water and would be very hard to locate.  There hadn't been any recent spawner's because of the various fronts that blew through and the lack of unstable weather.

The next plan was to head to the mid lake area and fish for smallmouth that are not that hard to catch, but usually are under the required 15" limit(the lake limit is 12 for smallmouth and 15 for largemouth, but for the tournament all bass must be 15).  About the time I decided to move the wind went from nothing to steady 30+mph.  I had 45 mins left to fish and I chose to fish the down wind side of a point and got one 16" smallie.  I mean it was windy.  It took more than 3/4 power on the 82# TE motorguide just to hold us.  I was standing on the TM pedal and leaning out over the bow to hold myself up since I didn't bother bringing a seat to lean against. The one fish went 2.02# and from what I heard later that night, the later flights did much better because those largemouth I was after earlier in the day had moved up and got aggressive when the wind picked up.

So day two comes and we are in the later flight that day(they reversed the order for day two).  We headed down the lake in a steady cold rain and fished a shallow bar that smallmouth cruise to feed on shad and I got one keeper early.   After that we couldn't find any keeper size, just scattered small fish.  Around 11am the wind again picked up to 20+mph and we moved out on some points and started catching fish again.  It is tough fishing in the wind, but it really positions the smallies and turns them on.  I got one more keeper and several short fish before the wind died.  A little while later the wind picked up again, my wife caught a 3#'er.  The bite this day was really light, and every one of the keepers were caught deeper and nicked the gills.  I managed to save one of them but the other two didn'tmake it.  This along with the steady rain, a long drive ahead of us and a Father-in-Law that was in the hospital from a staff infection that was spreading through his body, helped us decide not to risk killing more fish and we headed in for weighin 2.5hrs early.  After weighing in our 3 fish for 5.6#, we got in the truck and headed for home.  I hadn't heard who had one until I read this post.

In case anyone is wondering the Father-in-Law is doing okay except for the IV's pumping antibiotics through him and a big gaping hole in his back they are stuffing with gauze and changing regularly.  His fevers have gone away and the infection is going away.

If anyone talks to the winners, I would love to hear a report!

[Dan]

Just got of the phone with Gary Evans. Gary Evans and Doug Baker have fished the Tear Drop Tournament Trail for a long time. They fish a lot of local tournaments as well and the two just love to fish whenever they can. Gary is just around the corner from me here in Hudsonville and Doug Baker lives up north of Baldwin near Wellston. I got pretty much the low down and plan to put an article together on our teardropbass.com webpage. They won the 2006 Basscat Puma with a 225 xs Merc. They only made two of these special edition boats. One is driven by Marty Stone a BASS pro and Baker and Evans have the other. Lots of little things like 20inch wheels with fancy rims and the whole nine yards. These guys are still on cloud nine and you can get a picture and some of their story at these two websites. fishingworld.com and baxterbulletin.com.

http://fishingworld.com/News/Read.php?ArtID=000017574#

http://baxterbulletin.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060501/SPORTS/605010320/1006

As I said, as soon as I have some time I'll have the story Gary gave me on the teardropbass.com site.

Congratulations Gary and Doug!!! We're proud of you!!!