Wild West Bass Trail Teams - Oct. 15th - Lake Pleasant

The first tournament of the season for me and I had mix feelings going into it, but was really looking forward to getting my Phoenix Boat/Mercury Outboard out and running it under a full tournament load and wow it didn't disappoint.  Holeshot was awesome and top end was impressive. It really turned heads and got nothing but compliments on tournament day and practice.
My partner and I got in a day of prefish before the 5 day off-limits and we ran around the entire lake. We started in the north coves and within a few minutes had a solid 3.5lb fish and fish were busting shad. We fished the area for over an hour and that was the only fish. We did notice they were concentrated in the area where the bank had a slight cut, so we ran with that pattern the rest of the day. We then ran into the river and caught a few short fish and made a few more stops only to not find any other keepers. With only 1 keeper in the boat it wasn't looking good for the next week so we moved to the North Ramp area and within a few casts had another 3.5lb fish. We fished the area and finally caught some small keepers. It wasn't until about 2pm that we found some schooling fish and proceeded to rack up 18lbs for a limit (7 fish). We decided at that point, we were going to go there and knew we could be hero or zero if they wouldn't feed.
Tournament morning we were boat 39 and boat 27 was the start boat number, so boat 12 out. That turned out to be a good thing as we were the first boat in to the area, quickly followed by 4-5 more. The schoolers weren't showing but fan-casted an A-rig and caught one fairly quickly followed by a double a few casts later. We had a solid 3 fish start but that turned out to be the last fish on the A-rig. We fished the next few hours catching smaller fish that were moving up and down a ditch with some deep trees on it, but the keeper bites were few and far between. We stayed in the cove all day and hit each point and even the ramp dock, which produced our big fish late in the day, a 3.49lb largemouth, that was caught on a dropshot. We ground out our limit and even culled up a few times, only a few ounces each time but every ounce counted in this one.
We finished the tournament with a 7 fish limit for 14.11lbs and finished in 9th place, out of 69 boats, which was good enough to keep us in check range. It was a hard fought day but persistence and confidence in the area was a key to our success.