"It's not over 'til the fat lady spawns..." or something like that.

Friday pre-fish
Got on the water in Lucerne around 11:00. Water was calm, sun was already beating down. Saw tons of fish (good ones, too) suspended in the tules and under docks. Hard to catch those guys, though. Managed to boat a couple of 1.5# fish slow-rolling the Terminator. Also noted the location of a few bed fish for tourney day. Overall pretty tough bite.

Saturday
Day 1 draw in Lucerne. Although conditions (apparently) havn't changed, the suspended fish are all gone. Who knows where they went? After slow-rolling, carolina-rigging, drop-shotting, cranking, flipping, brass-n-glass, senkos, darthead, and everything else in my box, I finally put one in the boat with a white tube pitched into a bed. Nice fat fish, only about 14" but it weighed almost 2.5#. Nothing else to go with it that day. Back at the weigh-in they read off the top ten -- 10th place was 8 or 9#'s, so I'm not real hopeful. The only bright spot is on Sunday the field switches places (guys from Lucerne fish the Keys, and vice-versa).

Sunday
The wind howled all night and showed no signs of letting up. This is good news for guys fishing the Keys, but bad news for the guys heading to Lucerne. I start out fishing one of the 2 entrances to the Keys, figuring all the fish moving up have to pass through those openings. After awhile I give up and head back into the keys, mostly flipping and throwing a senko. I suck trying to flip out of the kayak! A couple of boats go by and everybody is throwing frogs, so I tie the closest thing I had (a Mann's rat). I get a blow-up within about 10 minutes. I pitch the senko back in as a follow-up bait and fish on! I'm using my drop-shot pole, which is very wimpy, and I only have 8-lb line. Luckily the fish heads for deep water and I just let it get tired swimming around. 4#er in the boat! I throw back in, figuring this was a bed fish and there's another one back there. Get snagged up x( and move in to retrieve it. Sure enough, I spook a good fish. Decide to give it a rest and come back later. Move around to the other side of the dock and get another blow-up on the rat. Havn't fished topwater for a while, so I jerk the bait out of it's mouth before it takes it all the way. x( Can't get this fish to go with another bait. I head way down to the bottom of the Keys to look for more frog water and as I pass M&M I see the wind pushing into the sparse tules out on the main lake. My gut tells me that the fish will position in front of the tules waiting for the wind to blow the bait to them. I pull up on a tule point and first cast nail a non-keeper on the blade. Second cast puts a 1.5# fish in the well...starting to feel like I made the right decision. Probably 10-15 minutes later, fish-on! This one jumps and looks good. I try to lead it out away from the tules but it gets wrapped up! :o I move the boat over the top of it and thank goodness it comes free. Another 4# in the well. One more to go for my 4-fish limit. Maybe an hour of covering water later, and I get my limit fish (2#) on the blade, all slow-rolling. At weigh-in, I'm pleasantly surprised with 4th place! :7

Good job to Chris, Chris, & John plus kudos to the BnT staff & sponsors for a great show! :-)

the godfather