where is spring?

After getting in some ice fishing over break with our friend Jody White, I have been really looking forward to spring. We have got some good perch and Ben continues to catch some good eating fish.

Our first tourney is in March on Smith Mountain Lake. We are looking forward to fishing this and are hoping to practice before the event. Its been a cold winter and were ready to get the Triton back on the water. This should be a good event with a lot of teams ready to get back into the fishing season. Were hoping this is a pre spawn event because that will give us a good chance to do well even though we may not make it to practice.

At VTC, our club has a few new sponsors were excited to be affiliated with. A new company, Wiskey River Bait Company, is releasing some workhorse plastics that will benefit our team and will certainly catch more fish. These baits are high quality, low in price, and are not lacking anything. The color selection is amazing and they are working on adding more. I will post some pictures when the time comes and we can start using them more and more.

Successful Summer

After a great start to the FLW College fishing series, Ben and I walked away with a 2nd and a 3rd place finish. We had a trip to regionals after the first event at Mountain Island Lake, NC, and the Potomac River was a bonus for us.

The summer was good fishing, we fished alot of new lakes and smaller ponds this year and learned a few new techniques that we were not familiar to us. We got some good sized bass on frogs and learned to throw a jig, really throw a jig, not just a flip or two, all day.

Before that, Turkey season was great to us all. Opening morning there were 3 birds down, Ben nailed 2 on film in one shot, and soon after I tagged one after calling them back in. Following week I took my father out and he shot his first bird of the season. A week later, Ben and I took him back out only to have him tag out, with another bird, on camera as well.

We have been back to college for about 5 weeks and we are now planning our trip to North Carolina for the Northern Regional coming up in November. We practice starting in a few weeks on Jordan lake.

This coming weekend is the start of the Vermont Bow Season. I will be following Ben around with the camera trying to capture him kill yet another deer, or bear, on film. Shoud be a fun season!

Mountain Island Lake

The first event of 2010 took ben, my dad, his dad, and I to North Carolina's Mountain Island Lake. We had some idea what was going on but we had both never fished this lake. Tournament morning brought a nice little cold front which we thought might mess with our fish. We launched and headed to the back of a small bay flipping docks it senkos and shakey heads. Nothing. We then threw some reaction baits only to find nothing. Our plan was to fish some trees we knew of by placing spinnerbaits back up into the trees. As the day began I got 2 short fish, and 2 other fish that combined 4-4. Not bad. We kept pounding the trees looking for the other 4 fish. I soon after lost a nice bass on the spinnerbait. We fished the same trees a few more times and finally ben got his 1st keeper, and only keeper of the day, a 4-6 largemouth to top off our day. It didnt seem like alot, but these 3 bass went 8-10 and was good enough for a 2nd place finish and a bid to regionals for team Vermont Tech.

Lake Champlain Recap

After making 2 top 6 finishes at the first 2 events, the 3rd tournament brought Ben and I to Lake Champlain. A good pre-fish the week before had us excited for the start of the event. With our luck, the perfect weather suddenly changed and a cold front brought a lot of rain to the Plattsburgh area. But with all this going on, we were still under no pressure to make regional’s and we just went fishing.

We got to Plattsburgh later on Friday night and we could not sleep from excitement. Rain on Saturday morning was expected but the wind was surprisingly not horrible. We launched a little late but the (expected) 20 minute run north only took just over 10 minutes. Our first stop was the opening into one of the passages. We immediately had 3 keepers in our box after only 10 minutes of fishing. We moved onto the next opening and I got my second keeper. The best start we have had to any of the college tourneys. As another college team moved down the riprap fishing towards the marina we were going to fish, they stopped and turned around. We then moved in and continued fishing down when I got my 3rd keeper, a 5 pound largemouth. This was the best start we have had.

We got to the docks where we expected to catch our quality fish only to have a giant largemouth miss a spro frog. We fished the docks only to have nothing biting except a rock bass. We moved onto a rocky shoreline with scattered weeds and lily pads, only to find the wind was too strong to fish it like we wanted to. Our next stop was a weed bed with docks, once again no fish. Time was getting short when we made a decision to move to another bridge, there were 2 teams fishing. We pulled in and I slammed 2 fish that culled out my smaller ones. Ben culled one also. We went back to the openings and the wind was absolutely howling, making it tough to fish. We only got a few fish. Onto the next opening we found no fish until the last cast when Ben culled out his smallest fish, with his biggest fish.

The ride back to Plattsburgh was spent taking rain drops on our faces feeling like needles in our skin. The giant waves were killer and the Champion Boat help up. We knew we had a decent bag but we also knew our hopes of winning were gone. When the scales were turned off we were in 7th place. The 3 tournaments we fished we finished in the top 7. We had a great year with FLW and we look forward to regional’s scheduled for November 2009.

Special thanks as always to the National Guard for making this experience possible.
Also, Ben and I would like to thank our boater, Rex Johnsonbaugh. We had a great time on the water. Good luck the rest of the season!