SLA Upper Niagara

Last Saturday my friend Landon and I competed in the annual SLA mixed bag tournament on the Upper Niagara River. You can only weigh two smallmouth and 4 largemouth. This makes it really interesting because catching good largemouth on the Niagara with any consistency is incredibly difficult. We are typically better with largies than smallies on the river, so this event tends to play to our strengths. We wound up catching better smallies than we usually do, but struggled on our largies. We only had one legal largie in the well by 1:30 and Landon rallied and flipped up 3 overs in a row on one stretch. We never had the chance to do too much culling and were mostly just happy to be heading in with a full limit on such a tough bite. Some friends of ours had a magical moment at the end of the day and put 4 good largies in the boat in the last 30 minutes of the day for a commanding win. We managed a 3rd place finish and a cheque for the second year in a row. Our smallies were all caught on green pumpkin/copper Imperium Baits Phenom tubes rigged on custom Tackle Junkie tube heads. One of our limit largies came on a TJJ vibrating jig with an Imperium Baits Ace for a trailer, and the rest came on a flipping rig.