L.E.T.S Chippawa Creek Recap

Well, I vowed that I would keep writing recap reports for our tournaments but have found myself reluctant to share the events of our first tournament....it wasn't THAT bad. Haha it was fun though. This inaugural event was scheduled to run out of Port Maitland on FMZ 19 opener and was setting up to be a smashfest. We have a number of great spots in that area and were feeling pretty good about our chances. But then the wind blew, or at least it was supposed to, and the tournaments director moved the launch site to Chippewa Creek in the Upper Niagara the night before with boundaries pending. When morning rolled around the winds had been down graded and the coast guard hadn't issued a small craft advisory so the event had no boundaries. This meant that if you wanted a shot at the win you had no choice but to brave the big lake. We made the long and painful run to some points and bays that we thought would be producing and we loaded up early on crankbaits and spinnerbaits. Actually, the first fish of the day was a surprise largie! You don't come across many of those on the main lake. However, it was a long and lean post spawner. The rest of our fish were stuggling to break 3 lbs. We moved around quite a bit but couldn't find anything bigger in the shallows. We decided to move out deep and soak some Imperium Baits Phenom tubes. This resulted in a solid 4.88 lb smallie on the second drift to cull up a couple of pounds. We went a few more drifts without a bite and without marking much. Then we broke a cardinal rule. We decided to pack up and fish memories. We had had a great spring fishing largies in the river and decided that with our kicker we were going to try and cull out the rest of our smallies for hopefully bigger largies. This did not pan out and although we did have a lot of fun flipping up tons of 2 lbers, that was not what we should have been doing and we knew it. We should have run similar deep water and ground out a couple more big smallie bites. At the end of the day we also had a dead fish, which is a very rare occurance for us, and this cost us 1 pound. So our already meager limit of 16.74 shrunk to 15.74lbs and cost us two spots in the standings. The top 3 spots were dominated by good friends of ours with 18.92lb taking first place and a 5.52lb piggy for big fish honors. All things considered, it seemed like everyone struggled to find big fish and that helps to ease the pain a little I guess:) I'm really looking forward to Event 2 at Crystal Beach in a couple weeks and I'm also looking forward to being able to practice for this one! Anyone looking for a fun tournament series for the right price should come on out. It's a team/open format with 4 qualifying events and a classic. You throw out your worst finish and qualify on your best three so its not too late to join up! As always, thanks for reading. Cheers, Mark