First time on Quinte

Yesterday my tournament partner and dear friend Landon Wieske and I made the trek to one of the most prolific fisheries in Ontario, the Bay of Quinte. We were competing in the Strait Line Anglers annual Mystery Lake event. The concept is that no one has a chance to prepare for the event and everyone goes out with the same disadvantages and tries to figure the fish out during the tournament. This format is super fun and typically makes for some good laughs at the end of it all. And because of the long haul it doesn't end up being a very big tournament either. Neither Landon nor myself had ever fished the Bay before yesterday and didn't even know the water color until we got there so we had to bring alot of gear and make alot of decisions on the fly. The tournament was largemouth only and there was alot of color in the water so we decided to start by flipping wood and docks in the Hay Bay arm. We pulled up on a great looking stretch with a nice 6-8 foot deep weed bed coming up out of the channel and a nice group of docks. We first pulled up on a huge laydown and before I even had a line in the water Landon already had a 3 pounder on. I made a flip past the tree to the undercut bank where it started and banged another 3. We were very pumped that our game plan was working so well. We worked our way down the stretch and had a half decent limit about 40 minutes in. But then the bites stopped. The fish seemed to have moved out. The problem was that the water was so dirty it was very difficult to have any confidence fishing the submerged weedbed without being able to see the holes and targets. We moved around looking for similar stretches of shore thinking we might have just burned up the fish in that stretch but all we got were small fish and no upgrades. We ran the whole arm and wound up fishing pads and mats in a shallow back bay but were quickly losing confidence in the area. Sometimes you need to just leave your old plan and area behind all together and start fresh with some new scenery. So we strapped everything down and made a big run out past Belville. The weather started to turn, the wind picked up and the sky got dark. We fished a nice offshore weed bed for a little and didn't get bit. Next we moved to a stretch of seawall and some docks and we immidiately caught an upgrade, then another. We worked the small stretch through and then kept flipping around the corner and into a back bay. Thats when Landon picked up the frog and started throwing to pads and laydowns. It was lights out. I picked up my frog rod and we ran out the clock blasting frog fish all afternoon. It seemed that where ever you found pads in close proximity to docks or wood there were bass there. It was a really fun way to spend the afternoon. We really just needed a kicker fish and we lost one or two that we suspect would have helped our limit but thats fishing. We were happy with what we had. It was difficult culling as we had probably 30 fish between 2.75 and 3 pounds. We ended up weighing 14.79 lbs for 3rd place. Nobody weighed in any pigs but first and second place both had a kicker in the upper three's. It was a great day and we had a ton of fun fishing the way we like to fish, flipping and frogging! Quinte is an incredible fishery and I will definitely be going back. We both couldn't believe how healthy the fish are there. They are short and fat there and the average size fish is big in comparison to alot of lakes I've fished. Next time hopefully we figure out what we need to do to find a kicker fish or two. Thank you for reading. Cheers, Mark