Nov 19 Citrus Bass Club had a tournament on Lake Weir, FL. The week prier me and my partner went out there to figure the lake out. Luck would have it we ran into a local who fishes the weekly derbies out there and showed us a couple of off shore spots that regularly hold fish at. All through practice I tried to catch a fish with different types of hard baits, since we were fishing in 15-20ft deep water. But had no luck. My partner and his son, on the other hand, were catching fish by throwing a BHB Ribbon Tail or Finesse Worm. It took me 6hrs to figure out that I'm throw the wrong style bait. Before we called it a day we moved in shallow about 5-7ft deep and started flipping in the grass. I finally caught 2 bass with a BHB Hawg Dawg, weighing over 2lb each.
Tournament starts, boat number 3 is called and we race to our first off shore spot. I'm throw a whacky drop shot Finesse Worm and before 7:30am I've put 3 bass in the boat weighting over 1.5lbs each. 30mins after catching our last bass we move to the grass we were flipping the week prier. Nothing, not a bite, a blow up or nothing. Did we over fish it? I don't think we did. So we moved to our 2nd spot, which was just a short run. There I finally caught our 4th and 5th bass which barely weighted a pound each. We noticed a rust colored slim on the water and the bite turned off too. We decided to head to our other spots out in the main lake to improve our weight, but couldn't find them there. Around 1pm I land our 6th fish but it wasn't going to cull.
Weigh-In was at 3pm and we were back at the ramp at 2:45pm. We weighed in our fish and had 6.2Lb bag of fish. Enough for a top 10 finish and a great points day. Everyone was talking about how the bite turned off around 9:30-10:30am and the allege bloom that was on the water.
What we learned was hard plastic baits might not work in all situations. Whenever we fall in a dry spell and the bite is getting harder to find. Me and my partner start talking about every catch and what is different from where we're at to what we just did. Brain storming during practice made it clear that soft practice baits would give us the opportunity to catch a decent bag. At the beginning of the tournament we had all our poles rigged up (shaky head, drop shot, T-rig, flipping, Caroline rig, and whacky rig) and after our first spot we had it dialed in.
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