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2004 Tournament
Season
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This Page 2004 Shows/Seminars
2004 Tournament Schedule
Links to Pages
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My
2004 Tournament & Fishing Season Recap
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Spring Fishing 2004
has been an interesting year for me. Overall, I went fishing far less than I
have the past 10 or 15 years. I had slow days like everyone, but some good
ones too though when I did get out. |
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I
started out the year before fishing began with a bunch of seminars at various
Showspan shows. I really enjoy doing seminars and we had some good ones.
been
a musky the way it cut his line suddenly. Nothing
new there for me anyway, but I
moved from there to spring crappie and
bass as usual. That worked better for
me. I did have some fairly slow days,
but also some really good days with
lots of solid bass and a few big bass.
Crappie fishing was really slow though. |
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No
5-pounders this spring, but I landed a few at or over 4 pounds… which is nice.
Being without my boat yet, I was at the mercy of various fishing partners,
but I got out a few times. I
also snuck in another seminar at D & R Sports Center’s spring fishing show where I had
a great crowd that asked tons of good questions. I really enjoy that. |
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In
early May, we repeated our possibly now-traditional spring trip to Hardy Dam
Pond for smallies. Brian had won his club paper tournament the weekend before
with over 18 pounds while catching a TON of bass. What a turnaround though.
We struggled all day with only a tiny handful of bass landed. I
never landed a bass at all, but proved I can catch walleye other places
besides the Detroit River in the spring. I landed 3 keeper walleye – 2 on
blade baits and 1 on a jerkbait. Of course, being the great cameraman that
Mark is, he only seemed to be able to find this photo of my 4th
walleye that didn’t ‘quite’ stretch to keeper size. Mark
might be a funny guy, but Brian was REALLY happy to take home the 3 keeper
walleye to his wife. Fresh walleye makes her happy… |
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My boat is back!!! My boat hull was finally all repaired and ready
for pick up at the Ranger Boats in Flippin Arkansas. I shot down there and
picked it up in two hard days of driving. Now it just needed to have my new Yamaha 225 HPDI motor hooked up at D & R Sports Center
before I would be completely back in business. It would be several weeks before
everything was done and usable. Then
the bass season issue started to heat up too. Between work, the economy, the
family and the bass season issue, I could see I wasn’t going to be fishing as
much as normal. But I shouldn’t complain too much since I still get to fish
quite a bit compared to many people. I
made do at times just by combining things such as when I was invited to be on
the Bob Bauer radio show on 97.1 FM |
in
Southfield. I would get on the show early in the morning and when done, I’d
head over to Cass, Kent or St. Clair to do some fishing the rest of the day.
Mark and I went out after the first show I did on May 22nd and had
a great day on Cass, catching a very satisfying number of keeper largemouth
and smallmouth bass. I also landed a good eating size keeper walleye (I
really can catch them other places). I
got my boat back with motor ready to use on Memorial weekend. Had a cool day
on the Upper Grand River in Lansing with my Godson Aaron where we didn’t
catch many bass, but we managed to rescue a very young fawn that had fallen
into the river and was getting hypothermic because of the cool water temp and
not being able to get back out of the river. Here’s the full
story… |
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The JR BASS Northern Divisional was up first. I
volunteered to help out as a boater or whatever else the Michigan BASS
Chapter Federation needed to put on this first Northern Divisional for the JR
BASS chapter members. I
had to be sure make the BFL meeting that night by 7:00 PM so in the end I was
put on computer weight entry at the weigh in. That gave me some time to get
in a little practice earlier in the day for the BFL going on the next day. My first BFL tournament needed to be a good one because it was looking
like it was going to be my only BFL and one of only a few tournaments this
year. It was on St. Clair on the Canadian opener as has recently been the
case. I had been getting lots of keepers the past few seasons, but not many
big bass, so I decided I could afford to go for big bass and risk not getting
a limit if only fishing this one. I
spent more time around the channels looking for early biters. I did find that
some of the patterns seemed to be on earlier than I normally have seen them,
but I missed the best pattern – mostly due to psyching myself into thinking
it hadn’t worked before so it wouldn’t work now. First place co-angler, 2nd place boater and several other top 6 places all came out of the channels that day. I did end up with a better limit than I had the past few seasons |
including
a 4-pounder I caught on a white crankbait. My two biggest came on the
crankbait and the rest were on tubes. I figured I had around 13 pounds and
with almost 200 boats, I thought I might squeak into the money. Everything
was going good enough and I had plenty of time until I screwed up and took
the wrong shortcut into Metro Beach. I apparently had the wrong opening
marked for some reason on my GPS and it had been 2 years since I’d used the
shortcut. We
went out the main channel in the morning, but I thought I remembered. When I
went into the opening, I even thought I saw the same flag and same lady I’ve
seen other times. I went around 1 bend and started thinking something didn’t
look right. By the time I was sure I took the wrong channel, I was afraid I
didn’t have enough time to turn around and go back out. Now I knew why two
other boats ran farther into the corner than I did! Not being familiar with this ‘new’ canal, I decided to risk it and keep going forward. BIG MISTAKE! This canal runs parallel to shore all the way to the main Black Creek channel and comes out still way out by the mouth. I ended up being 15 minutes late and threw my bass back. Just under 13 pounds made the money… |
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The
following day, I took out Lansing outdoor writer Ron St. Germain back to St.
Clair. It wasn’t real rough, but it was bouncy and not being used to bass
boats and bouncy waves, Ron thought we were really ripping around all day. Of
course, desperately needing to catch bass and being limited to US waters, I
was only able to catch 1 small keeper smallie before breaking down and going
canal fishing. It was just too rough and time too short to head down the West
shore. Ron felt he had a skunk to get off his back and at least he did manage
two almost keeper largemouths on a 3-hooked worm. He
was happy to at least get rid of the total skunk but we didn’t put together
much material so his following story was kind of humorous about the adventure
of the day in the waves and racing all over while catching few bass. Luckily,
he left my actual name out of the article so I wasn’t publicly embarrassed. He
did get pictures of my one small keeper smallie, and I guess, inspired by my
tails of muskies stealing smallies off our hooks (while not actually catching
a musky that day – which he wanted to do), he sent me this ‘piece of art.’
ALWAYS make sure you treat outdoor writers very wall. Especially
the ones who have the twisted sense of humor that enables them to do
something like this to get you back… |
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coming up like a dark Polaris missile! I
was starting to get into the bass season issue
with both feet. A group of us got behind Anthony Adams from ABA to start
holding our own meetings in preparation for the expected MDNR public meetings
later in the summer. We did not like the way things were going (still don’t). I
was getting on the Bob Bauer 97.1 FM show, in some magazines and newspapers,
and one appearance on Mike Avery’s Outdoor Magazine radio show to talk about
the issue. Coming home from one July Bob Bauer show/Kent Lake fishing combo
trip, my 11-year-old truck died along the highway. Blown head gasket!
Unfortunately, it was 4th of July weekend so I had to get Larry to
come for my boat while I waited 3 hours to get a tow to Lansing. Luckily
I was only 15 miles from home, but my truck was dead and gone… too old to
spend the big bucks to repair a blown head gasket and who knows what else
underlying. |
That
cut into my fishing even more. Good think I do have friends who also have
boats. I
did come up with another tank of a truck a couple weeks later, but then ran
smack into the 20-some MDNR public meetings all over the state. I made it to
9 or so, but also spent many hours writing my speeches and putting together
study information and documentation that our MDNR in charge of this bass
season fiasco did not seem to be able to find on their own. I put a ton of
miles on my truck, wife’s car, and Anthony’s vehicles during August.
Despite
the meetings all over the state, I still managed to do some fishing with one
slow trip to the St. Clair River where the wind blew hard against the current
and a lot of the river was closed off for boat races. I did better on Lake
Ovid with a couple days that proved once again the Ovid is an awesome inland
largemouth lake. Tore them up with lots of keepers and one over 5 pounds.
Some great Texas-rigged worm fishing, but the toad came on a small jerkbait.
Most were from the size of the one up above to about 17 inches. (You can see
the weed mats we were pitching to in the background.) |
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Back into some tournament-like competition finally in early September
when I volunteered to be a boater for the competition day of the Big Ten
Classic on Lake St. Clair. It would be different then normal since I would
not be able to fish myself, but take two college anglers around the US part
of the lake to fish. I
drew young anglers from Northwestern (Rocky) and Wisconsin (Alan – wow, those
Wisconsin team pants were something). On the first spot, which was a somewhat
challenging spot, Rocky landed a GOOD one – a 4-4 smallie. Alan landed 4
regular keepers, but they each lost several bass including keepers. We
fished some other spots but ended up weighing just |
those
bass. We had a close call while heading to a weed bed later. Another boat
changed course and beat us there by one cast length. The front angler ended
up boating 3 nice keepers in row on spinnerbaits right in front of us. He was
from MSU and ended up winning the tournament along with MSU taking top
college team. It
was a fun and interesting day, but a huge surprise waited for me at the end.
It was a slow day so not many good weights. Rocky ended up with big bass.
Better news was that my ‘boat’ total weight ended up 2nd overall
and instead of just the gas allowance, which turned out to be $30, I also
received a $200 award for being the 2nd place boat volunteer. Good
gas money I did not expect. |
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I was really looking forward to the now annual Mullett Lake
trip this
year with the lack of tournaments and less fishing than normal. We had a
couple day delay due to health problems of one of the members, but got up
there a week earlier than normal. I was a little nervous the fishing would be
down. The water was in the low to mid 60s and is usually in the low to mid
50s when we’ve gone in the past and really hammered the big smallies. It
turned out the bass were much more scattered and in singles or smaller groups
than previous years on average. I was lucky to figure out a good approach to
maximizing what the bass would give me. My best 5 the first day were close to
20 pounds. I did have one that was over 6 pounds take a grub 3 times and I
never sunk the hook into it. What a whopper. I saw that fish 2 more times and
could not get it to bite. After
that, I kept tossing crankbaits out off the deeper rocks and then big all
chartreuse or all white spinnerbaits |
also
out off the deeper rock edges with random movements into the rocks to see if
any bass were active. Most
days we landed 4 or 5 heavy 4+ pound smallies and a respectable number of
solid smallies. We had one slow day were we lost and missed a several good
ones and only got a couple each. Larry got our boats only 5 pounder. I
managed 6 to 9 keepers most days, which is below normal, but it was still
beautiful scenery with gorgeous fat smallmouth bass. I even learned a couple
new spots that were among our best. I look forward to adding them to the
selection in the future. Ended
up only fishing 4 ½ days instead of 6 when we had several days of 40+ mph
winds come in and pound the Aloha State Park campground. We headed home
early. I had fond memories of close to 5 pound smallies slamming crankbaits
and spinnerbaits all the way home. The bigger all-colored spinnerbaits really
made a difference in the number of bites during the week. |
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Things seemed to be going pretty good until I woke up October 17th
in the AM and went out to get some stuff out of my truck camper – I hadn’t
finished unpacking things from my recent camping trip to Mullett. I
found the door open, a roof hatch bent up and broken, and a side hatch broken
open. At first I was angry at the minor damage since it looked like not much
was missing. That was until my memory kicked in and I started remembering
everything I still had in the camper. The worse was when I realized I had my
new Yamaha V-Max 25 T1 prop in there and it was now gone. They also took my
good hand drill. I’ll
probably never know everything they took since I had spare reels in there and
lots of spare tackle along with camping gear. I figured out a short list of
things that I will most likely never see again. I’ve since taped up and
stapled some things back together. I also beefed up some of the hatches. I
believe I’ve since seen the guys who probably did it. I made it so obvious I
thought they looked like problem guys, and then told the police and all my
neighbors, that I hope they never come around again. After a rash of
problems, our neighborhood has been quiet again lately. |
Thanks
goodness for great sponsors and friendly companies. A couple weeks later, a
replacement Yamaha prop showed up as a ‘cheer me up’ surprise. Really did
cheer me up! It was unexpected and greatly appreciated. About
the same time, I had to renew my existing contract with All Star through Shakespeare
now because K2 bought All Star (I believe K2 is the parent company) and
cancelled all of All Star’s contracts to renegotiate new ones with anglers
they wanted to keep. I had just signed the original contract this past May
thanks to John Maniaci. I
wondered if they would keep me being so new, but I fortunately got a quick
reply that they wanted to sign me to a new contract. K2 also owns Pflueger
and I’ve thought they make excellent fishing reels, so I agreed when they
said they wanted to sign both rods and reels. I look forward to working to make
this a successful arrangement for both parties. The All Star rods I’ve
been using are great and I’m extremely impressed with the new Pflueger reels.
The smoothest and sharpest reels I’ve ever owned. |
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Normally, Derek and I fish the October Cass Lake opens but this year I wasn’t
sure if I could do the tournaments. It became moot when Derek took on a coaching
job for the little guys football team his son Aaron is on. They had practice
and games all October so he couldn’t make the tournaments. I
figured I’d get over it, but the week before the Ken Purvey / Last Chance
tournament on October 31, I stopped at Cass Lake in the morning on the way to
the state BASS federation meeting (at Bass Pro Shops in Auburn Hills). I
ended popping keeper smallies pretty good on my usual October deep blade bait
pattern in the less than 3 hours I had to fish. I caught the bug, so when
Vince emailed me and asked if I could fish it, I went for it. What
a difference a week makes. It was windy and cold. My normal best break – were
I whacked 6 keepers quick the week before – produced one shallow dink for
Vince on a jerkbait, and a dink and one small keeper on my blade… |
and
that was it. We started hitting other spots and especially keyed on the
wind-blown inside turns and sides of points. Between
a combination of stingray grubs and tubes, we limited out, but with only one
decent smallie. I caught 1 undersized walleye on the blade until late when I
landed 1 more keeper on it. But, even with the balance beam, it seemed to
weight exactly what our 4 small keepers weighed. We
each landed 3 keepers and squeaked into the last money spot – 5th
place out of I believe 30 teams. We got our entry fee back anyway, but the
largemouths got us this year for first place. Three of the other top 5,
including ours, were smallies with one combo limit. There was a beautiful 4+
smallie weighed in for big bass. It
wasn’t the win I hoped for, but it wasn’t last place either thank goodness.
No more tournaments this year. |
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Still
fishing this year some as of November 22, but it’s getting cold. The fishing
has been slow lately, but it feels great to get out when I can as always.
There’s been a surprise birthday party for a sister, a football game
(MSU-Wisconsin), a wedding and a baptism thrown in to the schedule, but
that’s life. I’ve been updating the web site, doing some writing, starting to
talk strategy for the upcoming spring show season with sponsors, and getting
ready for the trip down to Flippin Arkansas for the Ranger Boats Factory
Product Knowledge Tour. I’ve
made many new friends this year. More than in quite a while. That has been
enjoyable. So I haven’t fished many tournaments this year, but I still got to
fish with many anglers. That’s a great way to become a better angler. |
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Date Event /
Location Description Mar 5 Ford Field
Fishing Show L.
St. Clair Combat Fishing Booth - 3pm seminar - Advanced smallmouth
techniques Mar 6 Ford Field
Fishing Show L.
St. Clair Combat Fishing Booth / D & R Sports Center - 11am
seminar -
Advanced smallmouth techniques Mar 11 Lansing Ctr
Fishing Show L.
St. Clair Combat Fishing Booth Mar 12 Lansing Ctr
Fishing Show L.
St. Clair Combat Fishing Booth Mar 13 Lansing Ctr
Fishing Show L.
St. Clair Combat Fishing Booth - 6:30pm
seminar -
Advanced smallmouth techniques Mar 14 Lansing Ctr
Fishing Show L.
St. Clair Combat Fishing Booth - 11am
seminar -
Advanced smallmouth techniques Mar 18 Grand Rapids
Fishing Show L. St.
Clair Combat Fishing Booth - 6:30pm
seminar -
Advanced smallmouth techniques Mar 19 Grand Rapids
Fishing Show L. St.
Clair Combat Fishing Booth - 12:30pm
seminar -
Advanced smallmouth techniques Mar 20 Grand Rapids
Fishing Show L. St.
Clair Combat Fishing Booth Mar 21 Grand Rapids
Fishing Show L. St.
Clair Combat Fishing Booth Apr 10 D&R Sports Center Open
House 1:30pm bass seminar
| Ranger Boats work May 23 Bob
Bauer’s Outdoor World 97.1 FM Radio
guest on bass season issue 8 AM – 11 AM Jul 3 Bob
Bauer’s Outdoor World 97.1 FM Radio
guest on bass season issue 8 AM – 10 AM Jul 24 Mike
Avery’s Outdoor Magazine Radio guest
multi-station show bass season issue 7:10 AM – 7:40 AM Aug 22 Gander Mntn Flint
Grand Opening Crankbaits for Bass |
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Date Event Location June 25 Jr BASS
Northern Div L.
St. Clair, Mt. Clemens MI (volunteer) June 26 Wal-Mart BFL MI
Div L. St.
Clair, Mt. Clemens MI Sept 19 Big 10 Regional
(boat driver) L. St.
Clair, Mt. Clemens MI Oct 31 Ken Purvey Mem/Last Chance Cass Lake, Pontiac MI |
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Money Finishes This Year |
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Date Event Finish Description Sep 19 Big 10 Regional
(boat driver) St. Clair 2nd Award for 2nd best total boat weight (also
big bass of event 4.4 smallie) I
had an angler from Wisconsin & from Northwestern Oct 31 Ken Purvey Mem –
Cass Lake 5th Partner – Vince Reynolds |
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