TE stop two on Lake Noquebay

This past Sunday 1-25-2015, was the second stop of the Team Extreme Ice Fishing Circuit (Wisconsin) on Lake Noquebay in Crivitz WI. My partner and I arrived at the lake Friday morning and started exploring potential spots after looking on our Navionics mobile app. After finding out that the 10' hump surrounded by 20-25fow was actually 3' deep we decided to check out the deeper basins for suspended fish. With no avail on the deep water bite beside 1-3'' perch, we took off to the west shore where we had a tip of big bluegills and crappies being caught. Once on the west shore we could only find 3' of water with thick weeds even though our tip said 6' of water. After 5 hours of pre fishing with very little to show, we returned to the motel where the owner told us that he had "lit the bluegills up in 12' of water." So Saturday we found what we though was the house he was describing and after a dozen holes we found 12' of water with nothing but small perch. We then moved into 5-6' of water and after dropping the cameras down we found a long edge of cabbage weeds with bluegills on them. After catching a few we decided to move further down this edge and only look with the cameras to keep from drawing attention to ourselves seeing NO ONE had fished this area. During the rules meeting we were talking to a few other teams who said they were staying at a mansion with the same name that the motel owner told us. After talking about it, we realized the motel owner was talking about the west shore. Sunday as we took off from the starting line we saw 99% of the teams heading to the west shore and we were the only ones going to the cabbage we found. Within a few minutes we had our 8 bluegills which were extremely small. We then worked down the line and picked up a few better fish. With two hours left we decided to check out the shanty town straight out from the weigh in site. Once we got in there we noticed one of the seasoned pros was fishing the area so we decided to punch a few holes and there were fish everywhere, only problem was they weren't biting. While watching this other pro my rod tip bounced and I looked down in disbelief and all of a sudden it thumped again with a 7'' crappie on the other end. Knowing a lot of other teams would struggle to find crappies; this was a huge confidence booster. Shortly after another seasoned team showed up and I noticed they were keeping some very small bluegills. I talked to my partner and told him they might not have gotten their 8 bluegills yet. I then hooked up and stuck a 6'' bluegill which helped out upgrading. With 15mins left teams were starting to dump their buckets of fish to start sorting out their 8 biggest crappies and 8 biggest bluegills. While watching this I noticed there were a ton of very small bluegills in the buckets and told my partner we were in good shape with what we had. At weigh in, we were the 6th bucket to weigh in and were in 3rd place for close to a dozen teams. Soon we were down to 4th place then 5th place. With one team left to weigh in and on the bubble for placing in the money, we heard "team 21, 7 crappies 8 bluegills" needless to say we ended up taking 6th place out of 21 teams good enough for a pair of straight line reels. I told my partner at the end of weigh, "I don't feel too bad about taking 6th seeing 5th place was It is still surreal how well we did competing against seasoned pros who have many years of experience fishing the North American Ice Fishing Team. After two stops we are sitting in 6th place for the team of the year point standing and due to the amount of points we have there is no possible way of being knocked out of getting an invite to nationals March 7th and 8th on lake George and Boom in Rhinelander Wisconsin.