Wednesday, September 3, 2014

TBA Summer Night Series Championship - August 22nd - Saguaro Lake

This was the first tournament for the new Ranger, so Mike and I were hoping would bring some luck. The summer storms stayed away for the night and the weather was awesome, even got a little chilled near the end of the night. There were 29 teams that qualified for the championship and we drew boat number 9 out. I was hoping for a later draw with the boat still being in break in mode but we launched and stayed in position due to all the extra lake traffic out.
Our first few hours were a little brutal, with no bites and hitting 3 separate areas. I decided might as well check an old area from the previous year that only fished for a few minutes earlier in the season. The move paid off for us with a few nice keepers, including our big fish of the night, 4.59lb largemouth. With 4 fish in the boat and some smaller fish we made a few passes until no fish on 2 passes and moved to our normal area. Within a few minutes we filled out our limit and culled 3 times, but none of significance. We continued to move from this spot to the other and culled each time and at the end of the night we managed to cull up to a 5 fish limit of 12.53lbs, which was good enough for 9th place.
After the tournament we heard how tough the fishing was for guys, we were 1 of 6 boats with a limit, but we needed the kickers that some of the guys had. We caught our fish on dropshots, texas rigged plastics and crankbaits, this was our main bite all season. While we caught some nice fish throughout the series we could never produce the monster bags like last season. On a good note, the boat ran well, the new graphs will definitely help during the regular season, and until next summer its all daylight tournaments. I am already looking forward to this series next year and looking forward to multiple series this year.