Okanagan B.A.S.S. Inaugural Tournament

It has been a while since I have been able to get to write due to a very busy spring and summer. This season started with the inaugural Okanagan B.A.S.S. club tournament at Osoyoos Lake on May 3, 2015. The day started of sunny and fairly calm. My partner Matt Fuller and I headed down to a shallow flat where a small creek entered the lake to see if we could target big feeding Smallies with crank baits. We fished through the area with no luck which was quite puzzling at the time and continued down the flat for another 400 yards before spotting some fresh beds. For some back ground in June of 2014 I had been fishing this lake and found a small area about 200 yards long and 200 yards wide that was covered with Smallie beds and each bed had produced a fish 5lbs and larger. This area had been stuck in my mind from the moment the tournament series and dates had been announced. I knew that we would be within a week of the spawn but had fished the lake the weekend before this tournament and the water temperatures led Matt and I to believe that it would be a little early to look for beds in this tournament. When we saw these first beds they looked small and fresh and had no fish on them. We continued down the shoreline and began to work our way into about 8-10 feet of water on the flat. We found a large bed with a decent 4-5 lb fish on it but we spooked it off. At this point I looked over at Matt and said "I think it's time to go check out the spot and see if they are bedding there yet before some else gets there. We cruised down the lake and dropped the trolling motor north of where the beds should start. As we cruised into the area we could see monster beds ahead of us. The first bed the fish was pretty spooked so we dropped the anchor to keep us as far from the beds as possible and still letting us cast about 5 yards past the bed. From this vantage point we could cast past the bed then swim the bait into the bed and letting drop into the center. This technique works very well with spooky bass. Matt was the first one to hook-up and hauled in a nice 4.5 lb small mouth to the boat. He proceeded to catch the next two fish as well which both frustrated me and made me happy as we had 15lbs to the boat with only 3 fish. The next bed we came to produced my first fish of the day which was a solid 5lb. We then went back north to check out a bed we had spooked a fish off when we spotted a bed in 6-8 feet of water that must have been 10 feet in diameter. We dropped out anchor and I looked a Matt and said watch this. I cast out past the nest and swam a white fluke back to the nest and dropped it near the center. It is important to note that when using this technique because of the angle it will look like you are just at the back edge but when the bait drops it will land right in the center. In a rare moment a pure confidence I counted down 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 and set the hook as hard as I could. It felt like I had set my hook into a log until the monster Smallmouth started taking line. After a great fight we landed the 6lb Smallie we picked our way through the beds and managed to cull up about a lb and a half to get us to 26 lbs by noon. It is a pretty unique and special day when you look at your fishing partner at noon and say I don't know how we can catch any bigger fish than we already have. We knew we had some stiff competition in the field and thought we might need something over 6 lbs to secure the win. We left the area and then traveled north to an area that is known to hold monster largemouth bass. We fished through the area but were unable to find anything of size before we had to head to the weigh in. Our final bag weighed 25lbs 12oz with our big fish weighing in at 6lbs 3oz. Jesse Martin and Mike Ricciardi came second with 21lbs 12 oz. with a big fish of 6lbs 9oz and the Kelly's came 3rd with a monster largemouth that weighed 6lbs 12oz. It was an amazing day of fishing that will be difficult to top. The anticipation leading up to the event with the possibility of those fish being where I had found them the year before made it fell like a day straight out of one of my day dreams. It is amazing when a plan comes together and everything works just as a guy hopes it will.